Being grateful to a free service is a bit hard when a lot of those services use scummy marketing tactics...
There are some interesting, others well, maybe their free services are useful, but their tactics do not align and so it's difficult to want to support them just because I could. (mostly vpns have real trash marketing). I'd rather donate more to a charity.
Sure. But google does waste money if it brings them profit. It would be rather called an investment.
However the example of Google is extremely bad, because it can only be applied to very large tech companies who already have people developing for Linux.
It's not a waste of money, it's a bad example.