I'm not against free games, and if I was interested in a free game I would actively search for one. But usually if you're searching for trending games it's because there's a sale going and you don't give a shit about the free to play games at that time. Especially considering that the big free games that are "trending" are the same games every single sale.

I like the better separation between the two for sure

It's less that I hate free games, it's more that a lot of games on Steam that are free are either the freemium model, where they are basically mobile games with inapp purchases you're expected to buy to make progress, or some some shovelware trash that's a one trick pony and generally just a knock off of something more popular and better executed.

Yes there are examples of great free to play games, but overall so many of them on steam are not worth downloading and clog up the trending list since if someone really wanted their game full of microtransactions to get noticed, they can just work a bot net to register new accounts and download the game to cause the steam algorithm to pick it up and put it on the trending page despite it having a poor user count.

Who is against free games?