"The apps often demand acquisition of a paid license after a few days' use. Also, criminals noticed the constant demand for decompressors, making them a target for ridealong adware and malware. Many a download site also tried to confuse those who sought decompression tools with dark patterns, luring users to unintended downloads.
But if you managed to find a legitimate download that didn't infect your computer, enslave you to the criminal underworld or harass you with advertising, the ads mostly worked just fine.
All of that will soon, hopefully, be behind us."
This seems unfair. 7-Zip is free and open source, available at 7-zip.org. No malware, no ads, and the first thing that pops up when doing a Google search (yes. also in Incognito mode, so not an artifact of my search history).
WinRAR OTOH is of course trialware, and should have been dead years ago. I have no idea why anyone would ever recommend it.