No company is capable of delivering on "forever" promises, so as soon as a company makes one, they should go "on record". Companies fold all the time, or more recently, get acquired by the imperial megacorps who may decide to change the terms. The only meaningful way a company can make something forever free is to provide a self-hosted FOSS option (like Gitlab) because then that artifact can outlive the company.
The problem most people have is the company going back on their promise out of their own volition. In essence it could be considered a "bait and switch", especially considering the nature of the business they are running.
Maybe Pratchett was onto something when wrote this:
"Mention has already been made of an attempt to inject a little honesty into reporting on the Disc, and how poets and bards were banned on pain of - well, pain - from going on about babbling brooks and rosy-fingered dawn and could only say for example, that a face had launched a thousand ships if they were able to produce certified dockyard accounts. "
> In 2004, TextDrive bootstrapped itself as a hosting company through crowd funding: customers were invited to invest money in exchange for free hosting for the lifetime of the company.[39] TextDrive and, later, Joyent repeated the money-raising procedure a number of times in order to avoid the venture capital market.[40][41][42] and began to flounder, suffering from an absence of leadership and plagued by reliability issues, with users leaving for other hosts.[42]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyent
They took money from people and failed to uphold their end of the bargain.