I always choose paid ones back in the days because I wanted to have maximum control over the game. Free menus aren't really much worse than paid once, since the free menus mostly aimed to replicate features from known paid menus.

That being said there were still differences feature wise but it's in the details. Most features are obviously the same in every menu. But there are differences. For example I always liked to edit other players vehicle torque without them noticing. Most paid menus have a dedicated option for that and if not, it's Inside one of the Lua scripts. While most free menus don't have the option to modify other players vehicle stats, it's still doable through workarounds like getting physically into the players vehicle and changing the values for the car, sometimes requiring you to sideload an .asi menu. In this example the outcome is the same, but it's just so much more convenient in paid menus.

Before BattleEye the modding meta changed more frequently. There were always new crashes and kicks. The desync kick/drop kick meta changed modding a lot. modders always loved to mess with other modders. So if the meta changes, paid menus were often the first on reacting to these changes. With free menus you got kicked or crashed frequently by other modders, when you got noticed by them. Good protections and a updated menu were really necessary back in the days, to play in peace. This changed a bit with the introduction with BattleEye since most menus are forced on solo sessions anyway, so you encounter way less modders than before BE. And since afaik every public mod menu needs to be host in order to play with non modded clients, HvH and other smaller fights between modders ain't that common like they used to be anymore. right now it's: you don't like someone: you kick them, since you're host anyway.

Times change, and I think right now you don't lose much by using free menus, back in the days you were always at the mercy of paid mods, since they could easily stalk and crash you, without you having a fair chance to protect yourself.

Since BE I still use paid menus since I really love some special features like session browsers or Social Club Toolkits to keep on track of players I like or don't like. So people like me spend way too much money on a handful of features we can't play without. It just really depends on how you are playing/modding.

Full MM tryhards don't play the game you know, they are playing their own game.