It's generous but limited in some aspects. True 4k resolution is not supported (or at least wasn't the last time I checked). It also didn't support H.265 4:2:2 files.

I guess once you reach the level where you need to work on these types of files, it would be warranted to pay the very reasonable price for Resolve.

Yes. The free version is very generous. Most non-professionals won’t ever need a license for Resolve Studio.

BMD’s entire game here is that they are a hardware company first.

They hook you in with some really good software - and when you start getting in to professional workflows that requires specialized hardware (I.e. capture cards, I/O devices etc) you’re locked in to needing to use BMD hardware.

So it doesn’t cost them a great deal to offer the free version to most people because they have to have the software anyway to support the hardware.

Also, while they certainly make a profit on the studio licenses, it seems to be largely because offering those advanced features have costs they can’t eat. For example, the official (and expensive) Apple ProRes encoder SDKs, and advanced tech behind their noise reduction plugins among others.