https://devcenter.heroku.com/categories/billing
edit: I read TFL, no more free tier with a cron job hitting it hourly to keep it awake 24/7. Can't say I'm surprised.
I don't know why you'd want to point your domain to an app that's only up half the time anyways, so I don't think this is a big deal.
Domain redirects are useful for portfolio apps if you'd like to have some coherency in your urls, and maybe you're not trying to showcase that your app is on Heroku's free tier at that moment. That's legitimate, it's also a use case where 12 hours/day is likely sufficient. However users breaking TOS and keeping those apps awake 24/7 so recruiters don't have to wait ~30s for them to load is probably a problem Heroku's trying to solve.
The latter becomes more attractive now, and once you have learned to use AWS's X tech to run $SILLY_SERVICE you might end up using it for $SERIOUS_SERVICE.
It's not so much a "meh, I'd rather do git push heroku now than learn to setup elastic beanstalk/opsworks+docker/ec2+deis" than it is a "I just want to develop a quick idea without wasting time on ops".