I was a poor tank who had trouble affording my flasks before GDKP in classic. I never bought gold, but I did need to work to afford my raiding.
Once we had naxx on farm, my raid started offering GDKP runs. After we started I was rich enough that I could strictly raid log and afford everything I needed. We carried the “VIPs” (lol) sent to us by a group of shady Koreans on another discord who were basically running a large multiserver GDKP setup. Those VIPs were playing with obviously bought gold and spending unfarmable levels of gold on not even that great of gear. Most of them didn’t even know how to play all that well or would brag openly about how much they RMT’ed.
At that point I had enough gold that I could send it to alts and buy my gear in other GDKP runs.
So:
Bought gold → to the carries + a percentage to some shady AF GDKP korean organization running on multiple servers
Carries (with bought gold) → into the wider economy through AH, spending ridiculous amounts of gold on consumes because who cares we were all rich, also less of us out there actually farming and just letting it all be generated by bots/bad hombres
Carries’ alts (with bought gold) → to the carries in another GDKP (probably controlled by the same dudes who we coordinated our GDKP’s with lol) + probably a percentage going to some other shady AF dudes
End result:
Less engagement by players with the game world and more raid logging
Players who wouldn’t buy gold still handling bought gold and looking the other way
Cuts of gold going to some shady dudes who were probably reselling the gold (lol)
Offering an easy way for bought gold to enter the wider game economy
Sure, there might be some squeaky clean mom n’ pop GDKP’s out there, but let’s not pretend that everyone is on the up and up. The fact that most pro-GDKP guys defend it lead me to believe that they’re either clueless or disingenous/a bad actor.