You mentioned a studio/1br, which you can totally do in Tokyo under $2k, including food and other daily expenses. However, it will largely depend on what you consider a decent social life.
Publishers definitely don't see it that way; that's mostly an extension of a myth in order to justify the piracy.
Most manga publishers will see relatively little revenue from international anime releases. Even for domestic anime releases of the vast majority of titles, the manga publisher is only a small part of the anime production committee, and the hope is mostly that popularity of the anime can lead to increased sales of the manga, merchandise, or other events. So when the anime is released internationally, they get an even smaller cut of that because the international licensee also has to take their profit.
But other than mega-hit titles where an international anime release may also lead to significant international manga sales, the popularity of an anime adaptation overseas is practically irrelevant to the original manga publisher.
They get plenty of takedown notices, but they mostly get to hide behind services like Cloudflare who won't take action regarding these notices anyway. From the publishers/creators side, there is simply no effective way to take scanlators down.
Just to note, technically you can buy resin with money (you can replenish your resin with primogems, up to 6 times a day), but it's not very cost efficient so you're generally better off using those primogems on wishes. And like you said, you eventually run out of things you'll want to spend extra resin on.
Being unable to maximize a specific character's potential is pretty far from where you said "there are certain important ways in which you simply cannot progress without spending money."
There's nothing in the main content that requires you to have a 5* character/weapon, even though it's certainly easier with them.
It's generous enough if you aren't aiming for every premium character. If you play all the story content and events, and are doing the daily quests, you'll pretty much earn enough for a guaranteed 5* (80-90 pulls) in about 6 weeks (the length of one version update).
So if you're a free player, you can save up for a character you really want, or just pull and be content with whoever you get.
The leading reason for suicide is, by far, health problems. After that, you have economic/living situation, then domestic problems, then work-related problems ranking 4th.
Obviously, there could be overlap in some situations, but I think it's clear that "most" suicides do not stem from excessive work.
Unless you can point out where the statistics say that, your belief is just speculation. I've skimmed over the data and didn't see anything about attributing depression to work problems. (If you have other sources regarding this, please link them.)
Table 2-3 shows the breakdown of "health problems," and depression is at about 40%. Even if all of those were due to overwork, this is only 40% of the "health problems" category, which is not enough to support a claim that "most suicides come from excessive work." For sure, there may be many cases that do, but there are no clear numbers in that regard. Personally, I feel such claims only reinforce the typical stereotypes about Japan rather than try to understand the actual situation.
Really strange that it's purely due to health problems, because they have one of the best health systems I've ever seen.
I was thinking more on the root causes of those health problems, which might or might not be work related, that's just a belief of mine (that's why I provided no sources and wasn't very assertive)
