This mainly refers to jawg.io, the commercial cloud service that serves the basic map. The map itself is 100% OSM data, but the service isn’t free. OSM themselves don’t offer a vector tile server, not even for editors.
Also, F-Droid gives every app with a hard-coded network dependency the NonFreeNet flag, including e.g. api.openstreetmap.org.
They’re discussing a new anti-feature like SiloedNet for such cases, because at the moment NonFreeNet is pretty useless, e.g. a Wikipedia reader gets that flag too.
Somewhat shortened translation: