Yea I think they reduced the allowable size on the free tier to encourage people toward accounts to help support the project. I use an app called “Compress” to make videos smaller file size before uploading. Especially for short videos it works great. It shows you an ad before it saves the compressed videos, but it doesn’t add a watermark or anything which is nice.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/video-compress-shrink-videos/id1163846234