Yeah they only review when you make a new release, so maybe these apps just haven't been updated in a while
"Free Now" - Update January 11, 2022
Many other examples have recent updates too.
But yeah - the rules seem quite arbitrarily enforced.
As said in other discussions about Google - I decided to untangle my life from Google further. Quite hard actually as I am a paying GSuite customer and a lot of stuff actually is tied to this account. :-(
it always baffled me how people always feel this need to explicitly search for free stuff, without looking first if it is always free (esp. in the case of opensource software). I once had to cleanup of viruses the computer of a classmate that got all the viruses because he searched for "python free" and fell for a crappy, virus-loaded, fake version...