Yes you do.
But then you are in a conundrum to whether you save up for the next battle pass, or spend it in the store. With the Apex coins/ V bucks you get, you cant have both.
Plus, you have to grind a lot to get to that point. It took me around 80 hours of game time in 7/8 weeks to get to level 100 in the battle pass in Apex season 2. You don’t get the coins unless you grind for it. Not everyone will complete it, which is where they draw people into buying multiple passes, and why they have additional 25 tiers on top at the beginning.
Yes, that is similar time to the Gears 5 Tour of Duty, but that doesn’t lock people out of content with a paywall.
I’d argue the system in Fortnite and Apex are more exploiting than this. If you like the content, you grind, with the only paywall being the game itself. If you don’t like it, then you either play the game your way, or don’t play it at all.