Agreed, folks have gotten far too used to the majority of internet being free without considering that the backend systems cost money to maintain and operate. Take Lemmy for example, we're fortunate to have such a dedicated group of volunteers literally spending time and money to operate instances like Lemmy.world. However, the admins of LW have been fairly transparent about how much work it is to keep the instance running relatively smooth. Now imagine a service that's handling millions of users versus tens of thousands, it just isn't feasible to run it without crowdsource funding it, similar to how Wikipedia funds itself.