When were obits ever free? The family typically paid to run an obit in the paper. I can't imagine why it would be any different. After that, people had to pay $0.25 to $2.00 for the paper to see them.
Libraries typically keep archives of newspapers accessible for free. I imagine the long record of obituaries in this archive would be invaluable for certain types of research.
I’m somewhat surprised a WikiObituary doesn’t exist yet, with them collectively written and crowdsourced prior to death and licensed permissively. Wikipedia + ChatGPT to do the heavy lifting perhaps for the rough cut, and then clean it up.
Might try to find some time to spike a GPT or something and see what happens.