Before moving to gaming, I worked at Skype. No one ever accused Skype of exploiting people, or of facilitating addiction, or of polluting the purity of telephony. Skype made money by, essentially, up-selling people to paid phone calls. Those phone calls might have been to people's sick parents in foreign countries, or their kids. Imagine that! By charging for phone calls, Skype might have been prevented someone from speaking to their sick mother!
Freemium is a business model; it's not a moral framework or an ethos. Some people make terrible games with the freemium model; they likely would have made terrible games had they gone with an upfront payment model. The difference between the terrible freemium game and the terrible paid game is that people got to choose whether or not they contributed money to the terrible freemium version after playing it. They got more information before making a purchase, kind of like a test drive. Isn't that a good thing -- more information?