That feature is central for ClickHouse Cloud offering which essentially is what lets others have (the rest of) ClickHouse for free. If you need that feature I think it's quite obvious you'll have to pay. I don't think it's an unreasonable stance at all.

P.S. I don't believe you are right to call it "zero copy" either. The object storage itself is replicated and definitely does copy and/or split data a lot under the hood. In some sense it's no different from ClickHouse's replication, apart from that ClickHouse can't use erasure codes to reduce the data footprint, whereas many advanced object stores can

I think that is just the nature of the open core business - but like most such businesses, they're not very clear about how that is what they are, pretending to be open source business instead.

This is the main driver for their cloud ;-)

How? Have you tried contributing a reasonable implementation with test coverage and it was rejected?