I mean in the old system all transactions had 0 cost. It was free to interact now you pay...

That's simply wrong. There has always been a cost to transacting here, but most people didn't know about it. But minnows who used Steem during its most active state remembers bandwidth, because it also prevented them from using the blockchain too much. So not much has changed, except that "bandwidth" is not renamed to "Resource Credits", and the algorithm for distributing it has changed a lot.