From their viewpoint, Google and Facebook are not in the business of giving anybody traffic for free. Of course businesses divide into categories including ones that are trying to sell something directly who can pay more and those that are trying to get attention to place their own ads from the viewpoints of the platform that is an arbitrage play that they'd like to eliminate.

It's awful but true. I dropped out of large-scale web publishing around 2013 or so because I saw the writing on the wall.