This is an aside, but I was thinking about this exact thing in GTA 5 Online two nights ago... Especially after reading this part of the link: "For instance, the microtransaction engine may match a more expert/marquee player with a junior player to encourage the junior player to make game-related purchases of items possessed/used by the marquee player. A junior player may wish to emulate the marquee player by obtaining weapons or other items used by the marquee player."
To pretext, I play pretty low key in GTAO... just a simple country MC biker. No attack helicopters, no jets, no flying bikes. I could afford it... I own 3 drug businesses -- it's just my role play and mostly only reason I play GTAO. I've put quite a few hundreds of hours into it (mention this only to say I got a pretty good sample of deaths). And I pretty much only ever die when I'm just delivering a bag of drugs on my bike, and helicopter or jet comes and nukes me lol... I don't care of course because if you did why would you ever play GTAO... Just making the point that it seems like poor game design, poor matchmaking.
But .... Other night I was thinking, with such a huge population of GTAO players and an easy time to populate lobbies, why doesn't Rockstar metter match <Rank 100 players with each other, or players that have 'aircraft access' only with those that do, and new or non-aircraft players with just those..
But why would they? Why would you want to not let 'rich' players grief poor players, when you're also trying to sell 'money' to those poor players.
Point of the story is: regardless you're using special matchmaking to try match players in a way that promotes microtransactions, or you just let randomness make it naturally, it definitely still probably influences a lot of online games.
Rockstar may not have added 'bad' matchmaking to promote RMT, but I wouldn't be surprised that Rockstar's decisions not add 'good' matchmaking was to promote RMT.
That's the thing with RMT in general, whether GTAO, Shadow of War, MGS V, even Deus Ex MD. Whether it ends up being a factor or not, it makes you wonder, is X game feature or lack of Y game feature genuinely based on purely what the designer thinks makes a better game, or is it there to somehow promote RMT -- even if only indirectly and in a subtle way. I mean, for two of those games their RMT ended up being useless for the story, and people still questioned MGS V and Deus Ex MD's microtransactions at release; Shadow of War has faced the same 'integrity of the grind' or 'authenticity of game design' concerns
Anyhow, just some random musing because that quote I opened with reminded me of GTAO.