There are a ton of legitimately free IPTV streams. You can watch them through most media players like VLC without having to download anything shady.
To most people IPTV is a bunch of gibberish letters, indistinguishable from the gibberish brands on Amazon. Someone's grandma from Colorado doesn't deserve to get scammed because she didn't research the acronyms.
It is paid for via ads or subsidies, so there's no reason to block access to the stream, so they just don't bother, and make life easier for anyone building streaming devices wanting to integrate their channel.
Someone accessing the stream directly is not the originally intended use case, but it isn't any different from someone accessing it via their smart tv.
- How are these "legitimately free"? For example AMC is a commercial TV channel and as far as I know, they don't offer free streaming. Same goes for MGM, FilmBox etc.
- Strictly speaking this isn't IPTV, it's just web streams. IPTV is usually delivered via multicast (MPEG-TS/RTP/RTSP streams, over UDP mostly).