The idea to create a f2p game was to try and maximise income from a game because a large portion of the players will be playing via gamespass.
This issue is the less 343 do the less money they make. Its only a matter of time till a higher up at 343 or microsoft just says enough is enough. They are not going to pump resources or money into a game that the majority of players have abandoned.
The microtransations where priced the way they were to fund development of the next content. As a community most said no to paying that price and now we have another delay.
They wont hire new staff to work on a game thats in a deep decline. They are more likely gonna do what they can for year or 2 then move on.
We have seen this across loads of live service games in past. If they cant grab the core fanbase (call that 75,000 -100,000 players for AAA games) then they wont be able to sustain any level of development and we will see delayed content untill there is no content. Keep in mind this the content we are getting is hardly even new, its things the game should have launched with plus 2 maps?