You can give away software, but running a service costs money. P2p messaging can be free (and signal exists), but nothing like free and adless YouTube or Facebook is going to happen regardless whether google or meta do anything to prevent it.
agreed its trickier when its gets to stuff like youtube, but piracy being free and widely spread is an example of how its possible, just not well developed right now
there's also options where it's pay-as-you-go with stuff like bitcoin (e.g. i pay $0.01 to watch a video) where it's effectively free but on large scale does cover the costs of infra
And as you cite piracy as an alternative: that’s not "free" as in software, that’s "free" as in freeloading. Someone else is paying for it, just not you. That might work to fulfil your own needs, but it’s not a viable solution for business models.
my point with torrenting is that people offer their bandwidth for free without any real incentive to do so. if there was more systemic open source adoption and awareness of how systems like this work well when people make token donations (like with bandwidth) then i think we could be fine.