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Free hosting has been a thing for a long time. I remember having some free PHP4/MySQL hosting and they gave you like 50MB of storage space for your stuff 20 years ago.
GitHub pages and others all have some terms saying what you can and can't host using their services. It makes sense for Intel as it's an open-source project and fits GitHub's goals. People can contribute to the website on GitHub, and when the PRs are merged it gets deployed automatically.
If you're any sort of serious about your online presence, it makes sense to pay for hosting because that comes with more features, support, and certain guarantees about performance and uptime. If your business relies on it, even if it's just a static site with your phone number and email on it, why not throw in that $5/mo on a VPS or a hosting company that's contractually bound to provide the service to a certain level?
If everyone used free hosting whenever they can, it would become too expensive to run and provide for free. Most hosting providers that provide a free tier use it as a lure for you to grow into their paid offerings. Like, basic Cloudflare is free but downloads and video streaming through their free tier is technically against ToS. You need a paid plan to do that, and get more caching capacity, more uptime guarantees (CF basically rolls things to free tier first as if it breaks, it doesn't affect paid customers so you're doing free testing for them).
Free tier makes sense for individuals to learn and stuff, and I greatly appreciate having had access to free hosting for a solid 10 years. But I've moved on, I can afford my own servers, and there's nobody to go under and shut down the service or tell me I have too much traffic and kick me out. You get what you pay for, after all.
Are you sure that's still the case?
There doesn't seem to be anything like that here anymore: https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/
But in the past there was clause 2.8:
It might not, I don't use CF for my personal stuff, and at work we have a top tier enterprise plan serving PBs of data every month. That's what I had heard in the self hosting communities as a recommendation to not put Plex behind CF for that clause. If it's gone, great!
But I think the point still holds: they do this to lock you into their ecosystem, and when you outgrow the free tier you're far more likely to just upgrade to a paid plan than shop around and decide to use another CDN and migrate all your stuff and settings over. Individuals are unlikely to run into any limits, but most companies starting on the free tier will end up on a paid tier at some point unless the startup goes bankrupt. That's why those companies sees their free tier as free marketing (people recommend them all over the Internet) and as an investment (it costs a couple dollars to host those customers but they likely will give you more dollars later on and offset the cost of providing the free tier).
Same applies to even private GitHub orgs: they're free and good up to certain limits, and then they just hope paying the $5/mo when your company grows is far easier and more desirable than packing your repos and moving elsewhere, and have to port over all your repos, wikis, issues, PRs, org structure, pipelines and everything. At that point it costs less to just upgrade to the paid tier than spend hours of your developer's time just to cheap out on git hosting.