alyxw
Ampere had provided a very generous amount of hardware. Actually putting that hardware into places was a lot of finding DCs willing to support the project.
They also did things like hosting for distro packages, providing domain names for projects that could have benefitted from one, etc.
A big volume of tenants came from underprivileged regions or were in personal situations where they couldn't afford these themselves, and there really isn't an "industry standard" for "I need compute on a budget of $0," at least not previously.
After its launch, the Oracle Free tier provided way more bang for $0, but between their bad habit of (seemingly) randomly firing their customers, and the fact that initial verification requires a credit card, this still wasn't a perfect fix.
Trusting random no-name organizations isn't great, but for many people, there really wasn't a better choice if they weren't able to fulfill their needs themselves.
It's more like if Joe Biden somehow appeared with a trillion dollars, bought the Presidency from the former President (Can the President even do that? Probably not, but it happened!) and went "Yeah I own this now." And then add in the rest of your comment and it matches up pretty well.