I'm sure it is - but that leaves the engineer with the calculation to do of "time this commercial tool will save me" versus "time/goodwill I will burn trying to get the purchase approved".
This is also true of SaaS dev tools.
There are plenty of ways to reduce friction. In this case, mold could have offered a 30 day commercial license to the company to demo the linker and see if the ROI was worth it.