It's free and you're just plain wrong.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/newsro...underbolt-3-everywhere-releases-protocol/amp/
You love to always be right but good luck arguing with Intel's own website. Clearly says royalty free. You also cannot say it's never been free then immediately say it's free in your next sentence. You don't pay for it. It may be integrated with USB-IF but that does not mean any USB C is TB. There is still a difference.
In addition to this in today's announcement the only thing Intel mentions on their website, is mandatory certification. Nothing about a fee.
Your argument of certificate fees are based off a Tom's hardware article that was inferring the information that was not said by Intel. When they announced TB4 in January TW reported on this when Anandtech(widely respected), CNET, etc did not report such a fee.
From Jan 7 this year TW article quotes Intel saying:
"Thunderbolt 4 continues Intel leadership in providing exceptional performance, ease of use and quality for USB-C connector-based products. It standardizes PC platform requirements and adds the latest Thunderbolt innovations. Thunderbolt 4 is based on open standards and is backwards compatible with Thunderbolt 3. We will have more details to share about Thunderbolt 4 at a later date."
It says nothing more than what it says. If you can find where they get the certificate fees from that quote, which the article is based off of, then by all means highlight it. They made quite a stretch saying it requires it. Also doesn't make a lot of sense to charge people a certification fee when Intel's own CPUs now support it. 95% of the work is done. All they need is to make the traces to the port.