From my personal view:
The freerolls definitely helped me build my bankroll in the beginning and I'm grateful for that but once I started growing it (and not withdrawing), I didn't see the need to play for 2-3 hours to win a $1.
Definitely agree with this. I played some CC freerolls on Stars, when I was still living in Denmark several years ago. But even if they were still running, and I was allowed to play in them, I would mostly pass today. If I remember correctly, they typically began at 8 pm CET, which mean playing until 10-11 pm CET to win $1 and until 12 pm or 1 am to win the top prices, which for a $100 game was $20 and change.
If you can have a 10% ROI in $5,5 games, your hourly winrate will be just the same playing those, as it is by competing with 200+ people for a $100 freeroll price pool. Then you can play, whenever it suits you, and running deep is vastly more rewarding, when the winner gets $200+ rather than $20+. So for winning players the freerolls did not make to much sense. But of course they were a good opportunity for beginners or people, who had lost most of money in the their poker account