Sure, but that’s the only time they’re worth going for. Any other time, you can basically ignore them as the merces or XP gained from intercepting them is often not worth the hassle on later levels. Their value to the player doesn’t scale well, and that is a problem for the replayability of freelancer. And even then, anytime you prestige, you do lose all your weapons and Merces, but to counter this, you level up slightly faster, and you get an increased merces value rate which, if anything, exacerbates the problem over time.
From what I’m reading on the hitman wiki, the Merces you get extra does decrease the more you prestige. But only up to level 6, where it levels out again, and you’re then stuck with the same problem of having more Merces than you know what to do with (only now with a permanently increased extra payout!) and only serve to save you from failed runs and buying weapons back.
Prestige-ing is a good system, I wanna make that clear. I don’t think it’s a bad idea at all. But its intentions don’t really gel well with either the current state of the Merces economy or the gameplay loop of Freelancer.
You balance the monetary economy of a game by focusing on the coin value from the offset, not by adding in hard-reset mechanics to curb the problem.