No shade to the juggernaut of the open source software movement and everything it has/will enabled, but why the hate for a project that required people’s time and knowledge to create something useful to a segment of users and then expect to charge for using it in the future? Commercial trap seems to imply this is some sort of evil machination but it seems like they are being quite upfront with that language.

While I agree, it's worth noting that this project is a drop-in replacement (they claim that, at least), but Polars has a very different API. I much prefer Polars's API, but it's still a non-trivial cost to switch to it, which is why many people would instead explore Pandas alternatives instead.