These are interesting questions, thanks for asking. I will look forward to seeing the Freetrade answer about the fees, it’s often hard to compare different providers, and all the different fees involved can be confusing.
In this case, I think it depends if the ETF goes up or down in the short term while your dividends are cash. Probably doesn’t matter much long term and might even give you an opportunity to build cash and get it in at an opportune moment. I imagine they will look at Dividend Reinvestment plans at some point but it’s not on the short term roadmap, so for now it’s manual reinvestment only.