No it's not, the community is just paying for it collectively! The players deserve a game that's better because they're still paying for it as a group instead of as individuals! Stop individualising yourselves so much that you can't even critique a product anymore!
Gamer consciousness probably isn't a solid foundation. There's no real incentive for free players to see any common cause with paying players and whales, because the free players get a free game on the backs of the paying players. Then there's there fact that the people playing for free are likely in a lower social class than the paying players, who have the disposable income to spend on games. There's a contradiction that can't really be resolved by gamers rising up and realizing they have a common interest.
The incentive is a more united voice in criticising or demanding more from developers. The incentive is that, instead of profits being scraped from the game for investors, more of those profits are put into improving the game.
Developers get away with doing less because they have these loyal dogs in the community actively defending their ability to do less.
One of the things that I've noticed over time is that when these voices take over a community, over time you see the critical voices decline, because they give up on change ever happening and leave, the result is more and more of these people take over.
Unless you are suggesting that there is a difference between an incentive and the overall common interest I'm not sure I understand you.
The only purpose of the free tier is to increase the player base, exploit them for additional content, and pad out the community to create engagement - free players might as well be bots. They're scenery and props for the paying customer.
Then, the people with the disposable income for video games also have the free time to be involved in the community, so naturally they're going to take over. Inevitably the community will be dominated by people with lots of money and free time.
You even revealed it yourself - you called them "loyal dogs" because they are your class enemy. People without disposable income who play for free find that the game enshitifies over time, so they either go play something else (so there's no real incentive to stay behind in a shitty game and advocate to make it better) or stay and resent the dogs that paid to ruin the game.
There's a class element here that you're ignoring.
You've got what I said backwards. This behaviour increases as time goes on. It would decrease if those people were leaving.
Or you got what I said backwards. This behavior increases because the people who don't behave like loyal dogs all leave, because there's nothing keeping them there. This would cause brand loyalty to increase.
I don't think the free players are actually that loyal. It's the ones with money invested that behave like dogs.