Related to this is the question of what types of users there are, and after some thinking about it I think that's what confused me most about the announcement.
I might be totally off on that, but from my outside impression, there were a bunch of projects suggesting Caddy as a frontend for APIs (to get HTTPS etc), which would often be in a commercial environment. On one hand, great potential sources of customers, on the other hand it seems those using "new" projects like Caddy also are current on other practices: A lot of those projects seemed to be big on container-based deployments. In the HN thread already there were announcements of just building Caddy in the Dockerfiles (or other places of CI/CD) instead of using the official binaries. Once that has happened in one place, it seems likely that would be adopted widely (especially if a project is suggesting Caddy officially, it'll likely include those, since it doesn't want to require users to get Caddy licenses)
On the other end of the spectrum, there are people who were looking for a simple server for their personal or small-ish projects.
Some are go enthusiasts at the same time: building Caddy likely isn't a big issue for them, if they don't do it already because they tinker with plugins. Some others already use Docker etc, they also likely can switch easily to some process of building it.
Others likely aren't, some aren't even much of developers or admins in general, and really were attracted to Caddy because of how simple it is to use (or it was recommended to them on that basis, e.g. as I've done to some people that are more designers or front-end devs). For those, nothing changes if it is just private use and they don't care about the sponsor-header. Otherwise, both options are pretty bad: Suddenly learning how to patch and compile Go projects is, while doable, exactly the kind of thing they wanted to avoid by choosing Caddy. The commercial pricing also is way to high for that: Spending >1k$ on a webserver for a freelancers homepage or a toy project just doesn't make any sense at all. EDIT: Some of the comments regarding "open-source community" also point towards this. Not all your users are open-source developers which consider compiling yourself trivial.
This last group is the one for which the changes are the most annoying, and at the same time the group I before thought Caddy was targeting primarily. It likely makes sense for a commercial offering to target other users, but it isn't surprising when this group is making noise.
Somewhere inbetween seems to be where Caddy's commercial pricing was targeting: Commercial, using a few Caddy instances for something profitable, and willing to pay over going through efforts to avoid doing so/interested in getting support. Similar to Nginx Plus customers.
(Again, I might be totally misreading the situation here, since I'm not exactly part of the community, and certainly not every user falls into these categories)
