And most people didn’t get that you could buy it and not worry about needing to buy berries or diamonds for real world money. Not worry about your child spending hundreds of real world dollars when playing on your phone.
People just hated the fact that they had to pay for the cheapest priced Mario game ever.
I can't say I'm not biased here, I basically hate 95% of all the mobile games I ever tried, or at least stopped playing after an hour - so a 10$ purchase for me would simply never happen, because I don't like the platform. On the other hand I did do the "paid unlock" after trying it out for a few. (Ignore this if they had a demo, I never tried it, wasn't it iphone only?)
Kind of crazy that the whole market was defined by shovelware
Ironically, this used to be the norm when the iPhone's app store came out. For example, Super Monkey Ball was $10 in 2008. Over time, there was a race to the bottom, and then F2P became the norm when Apple introduced IAP.
People already figured how to not allow kids to pay real money in games. They don't worry about that. You just don't attach card to account or require password.