All of the traits can be unlocked by doing certain things in the game - mostly by killing certain mobs. The ability to buy a trait is there as a shortcut as there are a few of these that can be a pain but just organically playing the game and casually seeking things out should get you at least 70% of these things unlocked - the rest take a little bit of effort.
I can make up statistics too. 93.758% of players that enjoy the new trait system are really paid shills. Pulling a statistic out of my ass does not make it true. The only way someone will get 70% of the unlocks is if someone plays a certain way. Many players do not play that way and are unlocking 3-4 traits when they hit level 80. If you enjoy pve and getting map completions you will get more that but that is not how everyone likes to play. There are WvWers and PvPers that want to do as little pve as possible. There are people who make alts for specific things, like making a warrior for dungeon farming and a thief for spvp and roaming in wvw, that do not want to be bothered with doing other things on those characters as they have characters they created for doing that already.
Telling people they are playing wrong and they should just fart around and enjoy the view is a BS line. Most people have a limit to how much farting around they can do and still feel excited about things. Eventually you will get 100% map completion on multiple characters. At that point you have done it all, seen it all, and you are no longer "wowed" by it all. Different people will get there at varying times but everyone will eventually get to that point. Unless of course they aren't in to farting around in the world maps and just want to pvp and wvw.
In this thread
https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/gw2/Game-Updates-Traits/page/37#post4283981
there is tons of feedback explaining why the new trait system sucks. There is also tons of feedback on how to fix it. The best way would be to roll back to the original system that didn't force people to do stuff they do not want to do. The old system was perfectly fine and had zero complaints for over year.