[tyingq]

>Why would Amazon decide to compete with a paid product against a free one, when there's no benefit to the consumer to warrant paying?

They compete with free Cloudflare caching today. And free DNS services. And much cheaper VPS services. There are various reasons customers might choose low cost over free.

For me, since I use ACM already, for AWS hosted resources, I would appreciate the advantage of using it for other resources. Even ones on AWS, like a cert on a Lightsail instance, for example.

I say artificial because all that's missing really is a link to download the cert.