No one barged into Heroku. The company offered a free service because they considered it a worthwhile marketing strategy. It has to be free because no one, including the authors, are interested in paying for the projects that are looking for another free option.

I created an Ember.js and Ruby on Rails clone of an old video game called Heroes of Might and Magic because it was fun to show my old buddies what I could do and play through some mock battles. I have no interest in paying for a server to host this so it’s just going to disappear from the internet. I have no interest in doing the work to port it over to even another free service. It never would have existed had Heroku not been an option when I had the idea. Obviously I could pay for it, it’s just not worth paying for. It’s similar to piracy, I consumed a lot of content back in the day simply because it was free. I never would have paid money for those music or to watch those movies.

If you verify with a credit card, a single dyno can run for as many hours as you like -- it can perpetually serve HTTP requests for years and years -- but it will be automatically turned off every few hours, with some latency on the first request to boot it back up.

I would say this kind of free tier is quite powerful. It even had free Redis and PostgreSQL. But it had some horrendous periods of downtime and bugs that affect the paying customers just as badly. So ironically the free Heroku experience in 2022 leads you to the conclusion that it's the worst service you could pay for, but the best service you could mooch off of (aside from fly.io and similar) -- which may be counterproductive for Heroku's marketing.

Apparently Heroku is a welfare state program and everyone is entitled to free shit.

It is mainly a thing in open air markets like Kensington in Philly or SF’s Tenderloin.