Yes, that's right.

You can buy things to make the game look "prettier".

You can't buy any ranked levels, you need to earn them by playing and winning.

Yes, you will lack some amount of cards at the very beginning, but Gwent will flood any new player with a lot of resources from a different and very easy to do achievements to compensate that fact so player will be able to make the better deck very quick.

Yes, the game has microtransactions, but I doubt that anyone who is alerting about them took any time to look how they look in Gwent as any player can skip them completely without any harm to the competitive play.

Yes, the game has some problems, but microtransactions are not, for sure, one of them.
What? Do you know that Open Battle.net, that "DRM-free and stront server-verified multiplayer" you are talking about, had a lot of cheaters? You could level up your character offline and equip some godly items then go online to crush everything - that was so bad in its design. Yes, in "ideal world" that would be a good option, but there are a lot of "not so ideal" people.

Most serious players prefered to play on Closed Battle.net to avoid such cheaters and that's no difference to the current situation with Gwent - Closed Battle.net was online-only experience.

Good lord you hopeless GWENT players are so self-deluding from your ingestion of toxic content that you even have convinced yourselves to believe that harmful practices are beneficial.

Please explain where is the harm if I do not need to use these practices at all to play every aspect of the game?

Did you take some time to actually learn something about how they look in Gwent or you review them just by the sound of the "microtransaction" word and their existence?

There harm is there has been a study in many countries at their medical universities that microtransactions are an addiction.

Some people on this planet cannot help themselves at all and keep wasting their money on purchasing microtransactions.

It is a problem with the brain.

OK, so it's rather some medical problem, not the game problem.

First, I did not mention anything about microtransactions in my post. Second, having a drm game on a specifically drm free website is totally against what GOG is supposed to stand for. Thirdly, t does not matter what type of game, what context or what you thing is accceptable, you cannot claim that you own this game. Therefore it is a rental game and no different to steam, which again raises the simple issue, why bother with GOG, it’s more expensive, less games, less functional, just go and use steam.
As for “it’s long been accepted”, no, it has never been accepted, this exact difference of what is acceptable and what is not has been going on for years, pre galaxy, but galaxy really highlighted it. If it’s online it’s not drm free, it’s not owned by you, and it does not fit on the site.

FTFY

There were lots of options to design Gwent in a way compatible with a DRM-free store. Normal bought multiplayer game with optional account based anti-cheat measures, without micro-transactions, for example. CDPR decided to make it a fully DRM-ed free-to-pay atrocity instead, purely for commercial reasons.

mqstout already wrote everything, one needs to know about Gwent. So just the short version:

TLDR: if you care about DRM-free, stay away from this game.

Paraphrasing you, above.

It's ENTIRELY possible to know things are absolute garbage through reading and thinking.

I'm telling you your $20 USD offer is inadequate for what you seek. You'd have to pay far, far more to entice them to drop microtransactions from the game. Your offer would at least have to approach their anticipated profits for those transactions for the life of the game.

What you came for doesn't change what this game is.and how it is marketed, Play it as it is or not at your discretion, or ask GOG what lump sum payment they require to drop microtransactions entirely. If the latter, bring lots of money.

Microtransactions are addictive, to those prone to being addicted to them.

However, such is a personal issue best addressed at the personal level, as is generally the case for addiction. The sale of alcohol is not suspended due to alcoholics. The sale of cigarettes is not prohibited due to nicotine addiction. The sale of lottery tickets are not suspended or casinos closed due to gambling addiction. Likewise, microtransactions shouldn't be prohibited because some can't control their spending on them.

In most societies, X doesn't suffer because Y has issues. Rather, Y is offered help for those issues once receptive to it.

But microtransactions should be absolutely rejected by every gamer because literally every product using them in anyway would be entirely better without them, and better in multitudinous ways.

"microtransactions are OK" is a completely indefensible position from numerous perspectives.

So explain to me that why GWENT: The Witcher Card Video Game is the only video game on gog.com that has microtransactions being sold.

Dragons Dogma, which I guess has pawn microtransactions sold or whatever, a gog.com employee named Judilascariot when Dragons Dogma released for sale on gog.com I asked him if those microtransactions are being sold in the gog.com version and he told me no.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided also got those Praxis microtransactions or whatever it was that was being sold disabled for the gog.com version when SQUARE-ENIX started to sell Deus Ex: Mankind Divided on gog.com.

I tried Gwent the cardgame when it came out.
It was so vastly different an experience then the one I loved in Witcher 3, that I was repulsed by it!

I will definitely be playing through Witcher 3 again at some point and enjoying THAT Gwent, but this one I still have no interest in!

Yet despite of what you claim the community has decided it's better to have a multiplayer game here rather than not as long as DRM does not extend to the single player version. Yes it is accepted. It's only a few pansies that's made this an issue when a certain free game hit the store. No you don't own the game because it's multiplayer and that's nothing new as I stated. There are countless old games where the multiplayer part no longer works because the servers were shut down. That's a matter of practicality and not DRM.

If Steam is your foray then go, you're welcome. I don't see where GOG is more expensive since games are usually priced the same. There are actually instances where GOG has been cheaper. It's also ironic you claim GOG is less functional since some of the things you complain about here is GOG introducing some of that functionality.