I've always been under the IRS Free File income threshold (I've worked as a high school teacher and am now in grad school), but last year after reading this article was the first time I actually filed for free. That was after 5 years of paying for deluxe TurboTax.

I had heard the government required TurboTax to have a free edition. But back in 2019 (and before), if you Googled "TurboTax free" you'd be taken to a decoy free edition; the real one was called their "freedom edition," and was hidden from Google's listings. If your tax situation is 'too complicated,' the free edition tries to upsell you to the "deluxe edition," even if the "freedom edition" could have handled the situation just fine.

Thankfully now you can find the actual free version on Google, but it's still very confusing that the "free edition" is less free than the (still somewhat hidden) IRS Free File ("freedom") version. And the faux Free Edition is still being heavily advertised.