While it is being enshittified, I think humble will always be a great way to get cheap games. Ignoring the fact that IGN profits from it, it gives money to devs and charities, unlike the grey market (cdkeys/G2A)
My guess is that the demos are released to find bugs, so if the demo stays up, they'll get bug reports for bugs they have fixed (and I'm not a game dev but I'd imagine that constantly having to compile new builds that are specially made as a demo with the bugs patched out would be annoying)
Elite is still amazing despite the fdev shareholder's attempts to ruin it. Where are you out exploring? I'm currently on an expedition with the scg out to beagle point.
Setting a task to look at the task is next level procrastination I could only dream of achieving