Pinball games at the time often paid out prizes and didn’t always do so based solely on skill. The shift towards the modern idea of what pinball machines are like today was a reaction to laws threatening to ban them.
Fair enough, but in that case it's a bit disingenuous to say those claims were being made about "pinball games" without qualification, because what you describe is not what someone today[0] thinks of when you say "pinball".
0: citation: myself and gambiting and barneygale at a minimum
