You're 100% right.

That's how the network grew to where it is today. In the first few years, people would just give away Bitcoins just to bring more people into the network because they wanted it to work. There was no price, so it was even hard to find people to accept them for free (you needed to jump through technical hoops).

Just imagine the combined thousands of voluntary hours of software design and development that went into building the lightning protocol which is now available to all of us for free. Yes, there are lightning fees, but the wallet providers can use the code base and build on top of it for free. It takes a lot of dedication for the cause by so many people to have brought us where we are today.

We are now part of the community that will take it to the next level.