I'm going to look at this from a different perspective.  I don't know the actual numbers here, but a great many of the Plarium employees lived in the Ukraine...Who was invaded by, and has been at war with since February, Russia.  Now, I don't know if you have lived in a country that had been invaded in your lifetime.  I know I haven't.  But I actually give Plarium credit for even keeping the game going.  I can't even imagine the chaos going on in their lives right now.  I'm not a huge fan of their business model.  But I'm not going to rant against them for "phoning it in" this year.

No, can't imagine it would be that much fun to be honest with you.  Also nobody is asking you to agree with me about them phoning it in. ☺️

There are many things I hate about their business practices (from predatory advertising to the overbearing reliance on RNG/gambling), but a lack of free stuff is not one of them. 

That's a very fair point. 

Well, I agree that this year's Halloween freebies may not stack up to the past few years.  But I just barely, 2 or 3 weeks ago, had to pull my last energy refill that was about to expire after 99 days.  So 100 or 120 days ago, they gave us 10 energy refills, 10 classic refills, 10 tt refills, and 10 multibattlex50.  For no reason at all that I recall.  So, why does it matter if I get freebies on certain dates or just when ever they get a wild hair growing somewhere they need to pull?

so, I get your point, but really doesn't grind my nerves.

Previous years we weren't getting free legendaries every few months just for logging in. 

Personally I prefer my UDK (and/or Deliana) over 1 void shard, a rank 4 chicken and an epic book. (The energy and multis were mostly the same for the code and the pack.) But the login legendaries versus a shard or two is just my preference, others may feel differently.