[hey2022]

I think I responded to this concern in my previous comment.

Basically you are conflating free software as written and released by a developer with a completely separate service (eg Github) that is used to distribute this free software. Both the software and GitHub are free to the end user, but GitHub is likely harvesting user data for monetization.

As I said before, this does not make the original software not free. In this specific case distribution/download is not free. That has nothing to do with whether the user is the product or the code is the product for the developer.