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There's a lot of words and they mean different things to different people.
What is "free"?
If all speech is free from consequences, that's something the law cannot regulate. If someone kicks you in the face for calling him a bitch, the law can only punish him retroactively but it can't unkick your face. If all speech is free from legal consequences, that also wouldn't be great. Saying "I will kill you tomorrow unless you pay me", that's a crime committed by language. Ofc if you have a weapon the chance that you mean it increases but regardless, we shouldn't let people do this. And in the same way you could allege someone is a murderer. And that might not be true. That's defamation and we shouldn't let people say that if it's not true. And there's a bunch of less impactful speech based crimes. So we can agree some speech should be pursued legally.
But on the other hand, we don't want censorship. We don't want a company to censor us when we give our opinions on them, we do wanna comment freely if a politician is a rapist, and we definitely wanna freely talk about the US government being a corrupt piece of shit currently. There's some things the government should actively shield. In fact, sometimes it's so important, even if we are restricted by contract about what we can say we should be allowed to talk about it if the bigger purpose is worth it. We call that one "whistleblowing".
So it's a threshold in both directions. When should the government protect speech, when should it ignore speech and when should it punish speech? It's complex.
Side node: free speech in the American sense kind of just means you can say stuff and the government decides afterwards if that's legal or worthy of special protection. Which incidentally is basically what most other countries do iirc.
So yeah, "free" is just the framing of it, we deal with speech very similarly in most countries. Of course some are fascist, some just stricter, some more relaxed.
Saying hate speech is free speech to me is one way to frame it. But to me it doesn't change how we do or how we should look at it legally. Let them speak, and if there's a law against it, we react. And technically that means anyone can say anything. And also very technically that's free speech for all speech. And I really do not care about it, because I don't look at technicalities, I look at statistics or examples, and with that I think we're doing ok on the average. Of course trump's cabinet is really stretching that to its breaking point but for now they haven't gotten there yet.