I want to highlight that it's not for the current Windows version but for the old Windows 7 which is closing its end of life.
They did the same thing with XP, and any enterprise software company does this for end of life software. If you want support on an EOL product, it's not free.
The article jumps to conclusions -> saying this will cause problems with Windows 10, which is not yet EOL. This article is more or less flamebait.
And security updates for Windows 7 are also free until it’s EOL.