Nvidia played dirty, sure, but they did give away expensive, professional B2B grade software for free. It bolstered their position as the dominant GPGPU vendor in a B2B context, obsoleted half-assed libraries like OpenCL, and killed competing businesses in the cradle. Gamers subsidized it, but not by much (especially nowadays).

IMO, this is a question about where AMD wants to be in the stack. They can sell hardware, they can license their IP, but they're going to be bent over a table selling software licenses that people don't want. A free HDL software suite can help you sell hardware and license IP, whereas an expensive one can cut you out of the FPGA/ASIC market entirely.