Service manuals being free was the norm? I had to pay for the one for my Japanese motorcycle from 1982 and on every other vehicle I've owned, unless you mean bootlegging on car forums. I don't know anyone who's gotten free service manuals direct from the manufacturer.
You could borrow a physical copy from the local library, which often had a huge number of them.
There might still be automotive service manual torrents floating around with content which was partially a result of my efforts when I was in the "bookz scene" over 2 decades ago.
One of the bummers of the decline of automotive forums is the reduction in availability of the bootleg copies. So many are wastelands of broken links these days.
I can only speak for the ones I visit, which are primarily for Japanese vehicles: there's been a noticeable decline in post frequency and the info that is there has gone stale/is full of broken pic references/links.
On one of them, it's gotten comically bad, where easily >90% of new posts are from spambots, and it takes days for them to be removed after I report them.
Subreddits and Facebook are much more active comparatively, and that's a bummer in my opinion.
