Absolutely wild to me that you need to buy access to a digital PDF of a spec for a programming language in 2023.
However, the draft documents are usually available for free, and the difference between the final draft and the official standard is usually miniscule (typos, punctuation errors, and so forth). You can probably find it on the working group's web site.
Unfortunately, not for SQL :(
In a corporate setting it might not be as big an issue, but as a private citizen who wants to read a standard document for educational purposes, paying upward of 100 bucks is fairly expensive, so this makes me a bit grumpy. I completely agree with your sentiment.
I guess the theory is that only compiler developers need a copy of the standard. Everyone else should rely on their compiler manual
STL (Microsoft's ironically named STL guy) pointed out in a thread about whether there's a difference between the ISO document and the draft that even Microsoft's compiler devs just use the draft.