SSL was never officially included in the free license, but under certain circumstances it would work.
This was related to the order in which nodes join a cluster relative to when the license is checked (the license is stored in the cluster, so it's not possible to do those checks at node boot).
In recent releases we changed some of the implementation details, and some configurations that might have previously worked, no longer do. This wasn't done intentionally, it was just a consequence of other changes, but because this was never a supported configuration it wasn't identified as a breaking change.