edit: but, if all of the other "players" are disconnected ones who's stacks are just being blinded off, I don't count those as active players. In the real tourneys I've played, stacks that have been blinded down up to the cutoff for new entrants to join, got removed from the table. Stacks for players who have joined, but are just gone, won't get removed, but IMHO, if you can't even be bothered to be there and play your stack, you don't really have a right to complain about the other players who are there, choosing among themselves, to check down until your stack is gone. That's probably my #1 gripe about people joining tourneys, never showing up, and their no-play stacks out-last people actually playing to survive into a paying position. Still not relevant to your issue tho, but it came to mind.
I'd agree with this to some extent in those freerolls where people sign in and aren't there, but I believe the poster who brought up this issue mentioned it was PLO8, and there are no PLO8 freerolls on SWC. So I assume they were somehow disconnected against their will, and were probably going to reconnect again. I don't think it's legit even to collude like that in freerolls, but players in freerolls are much more likely to have just never actually showed up, and the "colluders" in such tournaments are much more likely just not to know the rules.