The basis of this article seems to be interpreting stage 1 of enshittification (“platform is good to users”) as being a “free rider”.
Indeed, while this can be true it doesn't have to be true. It's entirely possible to profit off of your users without being awful to them. Economics is not a zero-sum game, everyone can "win" from a transaction. Typically this happens because each party gets something from the other party that they value more than the other party does.
For example, I spent years on Reddit happily arguing with wrong people, deriving my "value" from just having fun interacting with folks about stuff. The server resources that Reddit expended supporting that were fairly trivial in dollar terms. Meanwhile Reddit earned a bunch of money by pretending to serve ads to my ad blocker and by selling information about me to AI trainers (or they would have if they'd thought of that before it was too late). None of that bothered me any, so they got something valuable to them from something nearly costless to me.
If Reddit had just stuck with that then everything would have been fine. Instead Reddit hired 2000 staff for some reason, requiring them to squeeze even more money out somehow, and the rest is history.