If the manufacturer prices are allowed to rise, the profits incentivize increased manufacturing. If the prices aren’t allowed to rise, the rationally selfish strategy is to hoard the entire stock of any non-gouging manufacturer and sell the product on a gray market like Amazon where anti-gouging rules are poorly enforced. The profits obtained by resellers could have instead gone to manufacturers, encouraging more people to become manufacturers until prices return to normal.
Nobody wants masks to be unavailable to the poor. The disagreement is what measures will best make them available to everyone, the poor included.
It’s reasonable for people to disagree on whether relaxing price controls would achieve this end. But to say that free-market advocates believe the poor “don’t deserve” access to masks is as disingenuous as saying anti-gouging advocates believe the public “deserves shortages”, or that people who aren’t tenacious enough to find masks at any price in a hoarding-dominated environment deserve to die. Any sane person acknowledges both solutions have major drawbacks.
That fits your narrative, no?
Free market ultimately amounts to how much can we push people's capacity to suffer in order to profit the Capitalists, can we raise the price of water, can we raise the price of food, can we work people 20 hours a day, will they still work if they can't afford clothes, can we psychological convince them not to riot and so remove even more of their humanity; will the poor still work if life-expectancy is down to 60 years, howabout 59?
It's not "putting words in other people's mouths" to explicitly spell out the direct consequences of what they're saying. When the price of a good spikes to several times its everyday market price or even higher, it's reasonable to assume that it's gone up by enough to make it inaccessible to a meaningful portion of the usual customer base.