We've wanted to make this change for the last 18 months, but needed our Enterprise business to be big enough to enable the free use of GitHub by the rest of the world. I'm happy to say that it's grown dramatically in the last year, and so we're able to make GitHub free for teams that don't need Enterprise features.
We also retained our Team pricing plan for people who need email support (and a couple of other features like code owners).
In general we think that every developer on earth should be able to use GitHub for their work, and so it is great to remove price as a barrier.
Speaking as a long-time user, over the last 10(?) years I've only ever needed to reach out to support@ twice or so, both times with fairly obscure issues that were promptly dealt with -- thank you.
It'd be a shame if the implied change to "community support only" for free accounts means that free users no longer have any direct way to contact support.