Agreed. I gotta say, though, most (not all) of the big free relays have come a long ways on spam prevention. I hope they can survive the future. I think there will always be free clients because they are easy to build and you can put the resource cost on the users.
Discussion
Clarification: didn’t mean “easy” to build a full feature client, but easy to get started due to the simplicity of the protocol.
I was about to make a comment about that. 🐶🐾😂😂😂 “easy” and SW dev do not go together!