> Will the paid tools always tell their users how to use the free versions, and if not, how will the users learn to do it independently?

The same way any open-source infrastructure finds widespread use, I’d say. If you’re willing to put in the elbow grease, you can probably set it up yourself (maybe even with the help of one of the frontier, uh, hammers, in its free tier). Or there might be services that act as middlemen to make it all more convenient and cheaper. But the difference is that if Service X pisses you off, then there will be Services Y, Z, A, and B who sell the same service using the same open-source infrastructure, so you always have a choice.

If you don’t like GitHub, try Gitlab, Codeberg, Gitea, and so forth. Or Bitbucket or Azure DevOps. (Don’t actually, though.)