No, they are not "forcing you". That's a voluntary choice you make and agree to by choosing their one-click binary download. It's not like they're the only XMR mining software in existence. You are free to support another project that provides binaries with no fees.

If you do the work to modify and compile, you are free to make whatever personal changes you would like - they even walk you through how to do it, which makes people's arguments even more ludicrous.

To the claims of the devs not actually doing any work: you only need to see the commit logs to see the amount of effort that has gone into this software. Hundreds of man-hours so that you can click a button and gain credit on a blockchain ledger.  Why do you not see value in giving them a modest amount of support and incentive to continue to invest into the software?