Game is based on selective access to content based on decisions and actions. If you take away that, it stops being a game.
Instead then, why even having to progress ? Yet that
then give everything to everyone for no reason at all.
It is like those people who argue that “Doctors are not people who study medicine, but people who gatekeep what is a doctor from people who might a doctor but in a different way”.
There is a long line of failed games, and two of them that I know of, from Funcom, which died because people were getting stuff for no reason. And that includes unlocking stuff for your account, meaning you start a character with N advantages to compete in the starting zone with characters who are starting the game.
Sure it is not a problem for the person bearing the “heirlooms”, but it makes the experience of new players miserable, as they see people on their “level” with crap they cant imagine, just because they have another character which unlocked it.
The entitlement and selfishness of that is off the charts, literally, because all games which feature that have clear “off the cliff charts” in new player retention.
On the other hand you have the problem with the other side of the progression, in which a fresh one character only has the work to unlock X things by having to work for them, while someone else gets 3X by having 3 characters which are not burdened by “cost of opportunity” as they can be 3 different characters doing only one thing each and not having to bear the strife to acquire the power they would otherwise require to unlock such 3X, which after a while foment the “impossible” alternative.
If a person is ok with the fact that someone who spends whole days playing “must” be rewarded by account wide unlocks so their time gets them faster and easier to things another player who doesnt want to play several characters, that is fine, as long as you assume what you asking for, and dont disguise it as “bar content from players”. Because that is a blanket nonsense. Account wide unlock does not “free content otherwise blocked”, it just requires you to play the game as much as anyone to the extent of the number of characters you have, so if you want to have 2 characters, you need to work for them twice as much. That is the truth, you are not asking to be “given access to content”, you are asking to “get a shortcut to not work as hard as the number of characters you have”.
No more than in a sandbox survival openworld game, you SHOULD be rewarded by having one character which survives the longest and conquer the most.
This nonsense about choice, freedoms and other stuff works nice in politics, or not even there, but sure has nothing to do with this issue.