Which is why the response was to you and not the OP. You has just respond to someone else, who HAD said "they are not free" and you disagreed with him. It was YOU who was saying they are free.
It's not my house rule, but I absolutely think it's a reasonable house rule. He's not limiting your ability to rest - he is limiting your ability to regain some abilities and hit points from a rest. The creators of the game have already said they recognize this is a playstyle they will support, with support for it in the DMG. This DM, lacking a DMG right now, is just doing their best to address the issue now. Extending the time between short rests makes as much sense as the current time between short rests (1 hour). If the 1 hour makes sense, then the 8 hours makes sense - neither are really based on anything other than a vague time frame concept.
Some may. I am saying the game does not assume you get short rests at fixed rates - it assumes a widely variable rate, and this DM is simply encoding that rate at a different time frame than you prefer. It does not make his preference wrong and yours right. In fact I gotta ask, how often in your experience are you finding the party takes a short rest in your games?
ALL short rests are based on an arbitrary time limit, so complaining you like one arbitrary limit and not the other is silly.
That is not how I read it - the tone is very clearly aggressive on the player's part, and not aggressive on the DMs part. Other players also mention that the player in question is being aggressive. It's a matter of tone more than anything else. Others in this thread also noticed it.