Just my experience, but I think it's that Free engages a senses of entitlement because in many people's minds, Free means it's rightfully theirs and that any action that inhibits their ability to get what is theirs is an offense of a high degree.

While I don't work with any of our branding team/activities much, our generalist support team was moved under my purview and all issues related to giveaways or brand events come through the support team (their main duties are related to stuff like account management, issues with the public site, licensing management, etc).

The absolutely awful statements and behaviors from persons who didn't get stuff like a free T-Shirt for participating in an event is astounding, and it's a truly global phenomenon, as users from probably 30+ countries have needed management level intervention to tell them basically "knock that shit off you're an adult and this is about a T-Shirt" fairly frequently. They are very openly offensive towards my generalist staff when the staff try to explain stuff like "the distributor is based in N country, moving it to Y country is still heavily delayed due to the world situation right now" (e.g., COVID, war, etc).

But the common response is "I don't care, this is _MY_ t-shirt and you owe it to me", and they spam and harass multiple times a week for weeks on end. It's really difficult to deal with because I've not been clever enough to figure out how to appeal to any sense of patience and most of the times just issue an ultimatum email of "Stop spamming or I'll cancel the order entirely." This is after they're given items like tracking numbers so they themselves can see that the stuff is just caught up in the system or being told that we are waiting for the next batch of swag to be branded and shipped to us.

Overwhelmingly though, the idea presented is that "It's mine, I'm _legally_ entitled to it, you are doing something illegal by not giving it to me right now", and so far I've not been able to come up with a way that shakes this mentality and stops the abhorrent behavior. (Truly, some of the things they say are absolutely outrageous and offensive towards my generalist staff)

With our free product, we get a lot of the same behavior too, but at least this one I understand because it's either:

1. Company found out our free edition works great for their setup so no need to buy a paid license, but since free has no support guarantee, if there is an issue they're out of luck unless we happen to have spare bandwidth on the Support side, which since COVID began has been rare. (I'm 200% for don't pay if you don't need to and I'm glad the product is so good the limited free edition works for them! I don't want to sell anything cause I'm not a sales person)

2. Small MSPs/Providers get pissed when they sell the Free edition (against our EULA very explicitly) and then realize that if something happens in their client environment, we won't support it

For these cases at least the motivation feels a bit stronger to me. (one is just feeling trapped without support, the latter is having to face the reality they're breaking EULA and they built their business on a not-legal premise and might have to admit to their clients they've been charging them for a free product) I absolutely get _where_ the frustration comes from and where the entitlement is based on since there's a bit more at stake. But compared to "where's my sticker collection you promised!?", I even feel sympathy towards the free-edition users because probably it is pretty stressful and scary.

Ultimately Free does give a sense of entitlement; people think they should get exactly what they imagine in their mind and by that point it's not something they might get, it's their property that you're denying. It's honestly extremely depressing to deal with such issues and explain to persons with tons of accolades and technical acumen that "you can't treat people like shit just because you didn't get a T-Shirt" and that it really isn't theirs until its in their hands.

Addendum edit: The less said about Twitter/reddit facilitating such complaints the better. Absolutely awful media, and while sometimes there are some voices of reason in the mob, the majority bandwagon and just exacerbate the issue, which gets the social media team in a tizzy as they also aren't equipped to explain such situations or crowd-control the threads.