Tomoyuki I would agree that people who don't pay don't have the right to demand anything. If someone pays for something and they're not happy with it you can in theory ask for a refund but if you have paid $0 then that can easily be refunded. I would also like to add that threatening authors is likely to be counterproductive as I imagine that making unreasonable demands is only likely to make an author drop a novel.
Although my main point is that quite a lot of the problems are actually due to the platform (Webnovel) rather than authors or readers. For example authors don't have much control over what chapters are freely available with Webnovel in some cases forcing premium/privilege upon them. So readers blaming authors is definitely misplaced as it's entirely Webnovel that determines how platform operates and as they keep quiet authors are made out as scapegoats. On the other hand as far as financials go Webnovel is very opaque with limited details where exact breakdown is unclear with it structured so that Webnovel always makes a profit while authors are left to fend for themselves. I can imagine that if an author writes a relatively successful novel that does well in rankings and then at the end of the month Webnovel says "You got a lot of readers but as they all used free passes you'll get practically nothing" it must be really frustrating for an author and it's easy to blame said readers who used free passes.
To me a lot of the problems arising are due to the business model used by Webnovel. For example let's say you have an average reader income of $100000 per month. Let's then assume that 28% goes to the authors (30% app store cut, then 50% to author minus mystery expenses) that's $28000 per month for every author. Let's assume you have 100 authors and then it works out at $280 per month average per author. However if you have 1000 authors then it works out at $28 per month average. I'm aware that Webnovel has spent a lot of effort attracting authors from Wattpad but I don't think they've tried to attract new users.
So in conclusion I think we've got a stagnant user base with an ever increasing pool of authors competing to attract readers and thus getting an ever lower % market share thus income. Webnovel is happy either way as their income doesn't change if 10 authors make $100000 or 100000 authors each make $10. However authors are likely to struggle in the later scenario that is what we're heading towards.