I agree. Over time I have learned to be a lot more careful with the context window and periodically start over to keep it small. This was one of the reasons I left the free ChatGPT, it seemed to have a very small context window and was not graceful at all about going outside it. Gemini free tier was a lot more graceful about this. I think the advantage of the paid tiers is simply that they will try to manage for longer and report to you how big your context window has gotten. So you have more time and you know when to start thinking about starting from scratch again.