Philosophically, I'm an evil baby-eating capitalist so I'm not opposed in principle to the whole idea of paid mods. Here are my concerns:
Seeing individually packaged weapons and outfits with price tags cluttering the Workshop makes it more tedious to browse for more substantial content. Personally, I hate micro-DLC for games that already have a normal price tag. Many people perceive it as petty nickel-and-diming.
I do not consider it appropriate to require a paying customer to obtain a third party compatibility patch to enable use of purchased content. By disallowing price tags on that class of mods, though, it could provide an incentive for Bethesda or other original game devs to offer ongoing compatibility support with official patches, in order to collect their share of revenue from those mods. The important element would be extending the game engine in whatever ways are necessary to eliminate the widespread need for third party patches like SKSE(script extension), SkyUI(UI extension) and FNIS(animation extension).
Many users feel a voluntary contribution button would have been enough. At the very least, this should have been introduced first with a few months of data collection before allowing the full paywall.
While in certain ways a hands-off approach is respectable, there really need to be curators verifying the authors and that all content is properly licensed before allowing a price tag. Some modders appear to fraudulently selling other people's work, sometimes unauthorized bundles of other people's mods, and some free content is being pulled just to prevent it from being stolen, which is especially concerning.
I think a good solution for keeping the free side alive while promoting high quality paid content, would be to feature popular authors and their top-rated mods, on the Workshop front page and the after-game popup, but give greater weight to the popularity of the author's free content in deciding who gets featured in the first place. This would create a structure where authors earn advertising space for their paid mods by contributing good free mods, and keeping their free content clear of annoying popups and other advertising clutter, since that sort of thing would provoke down-voting.