These parents definitely have a case. Epic let's you play fortnight for free, but they use every tactic in the book to get you to buy the battle pass, or spend money on cosmetics. I'm positive they have some kind of social engineering group in Epic to move the switches to tickle that ich to make you want to play\spend money.
I'm all for personal responsibility, but it seems like it's a lot of kids addicted to Fortnight. I don't think it's a bad idea to investigate/push back on.