https://xkcd.com/1357/

I think you are conflating free speech with right to a platform and distribution. Which isn't quite a right, or at least not as constitutional, the former is about not obstructing speech, the latter is about positively enabling it.

One of the key aspects of distribution is cost. You can pay for a domain, which is 15$/yr, and a host (which can be as cheap), and distribute your software that way. Since when did we agree that randoms have right to publish software, and vanish? (And why are 'we' using such code in production with a straight face?) The internet founding fathers wisely designed Domain names, DNS, ICANN, HTTP, TCP, IP, NICs. NPM is not in that echelon, NPM is gratis, not freedom.

Also, freedom is, unless you are a libertarian a patriot or a nation, a historical concept, not irrelevant, but definitely a concept that was born out of a different time (slavery, secession), in its modern american sense, it's most definitely not gratis-adjacent.

To reference a specific American Freedom, in order to have access to justice, you have to pay court fees, and an attorney, there's mechanisms in place to waive those fees or have a public defender, but not even America's modern freedom developed a secondary system which pretended to have no cost, and if it did (private lateral arbitration).

I guess private entities have the right to offer public services by proxy, like with subdomains, github pages, vercel, npm packages. But I wouldn't call that freedom, in essence, the cake you can't have and eat in this case is Freedom and Gratis. You either pay the minimum costs established by the public system, or use a gratis non-free system to distribute your 'speech'.

And we the users, have the right to ignore the gratis spam and demand some sort of PoW for messages.

The system works