- Edited
I've been sceptical of the changes myself, especially on the numbers end of things, but I think, in the long term, these token systems are superior to what we have with Western web novels and their existence in Korea/Japan/China is precisely why their scenes have thrived much more than ours.
Now that adblockers having basically eliminated ad revenue outside of the mobile market, western authors/translators must either work for free or, for a tiny few, live off donations from their readers. Doing it as a labour of love might be OK for a 100-200 chapter novel, but for a 1000+ chapter epic with regular releases 3-5 times a week? A translator might be able to do this by sacrificing their afternoons and weekends. For an author, though, that is pretty much the workload of a full-time white-collar job - unless they've somehow learned to provide their nutrition needs via photosynthesis, it's not really sustainable, not for years.
Edit: I think it's also worth noting that, by taking these monetization measures and thereby being able to hire fulltime translators, this website is pumping out more free chapters per week than its predecessors. If you simply pretend the locked chapters don't exist, you are reading more chapters per day than you were pre-Qidian. Right now, I'm following a dozen translations on other sites, and their releases are weekly or fortnightly.