The game's use of alignment in the MM seems to refute your claim on the fundamental nature of CN. In the great wheel cosmology, Limbo is the CN plane in 5e and it's primary inhabitants are the CN Slaadi. "[W]eaker slaadi obey the stronger ones under threat of annihilation". They reproduce by forcibly injecting their eggs into humanoids. The purely CN Red, Blue, Green, and Gray Slaad who are "successful" eventually do what the authors of 4E and the alignment essay in Dungeons & Dragons and Philosophy could have told us would probably happen, and they become CE as Death Slaad. Looking at the other CN creatures, Marids explicitly own slaves (but they treat them well, yay?). I have a hard time imagining a Cloaker (waiting to eat the sick and straggling) , Cyclops (driving off strangers), Kenku (stealing your shiny baubles), Magmin (heh heh fire!), Quaggoth (brutal and savage, cannibals if needed), Satyrs (into kidnapping to feed their hedonism), or Thri-Kreen (will eat you if you aren't otherwise useful) caring at all about whether others have freedom unless it impacts their own.
I can certainly envision a CN character who wants to protect others' freedom because it brings them pleasure, because it sticks it to the man, or because they were slaves once too. But there is RAW of those who are CN owning slaves, kidnapping, and eating other sentient beings if they have no greater use. Clearly if Crawford (PhB) now wanted CN to be the alignment that stands up for freedom in general he woefully failed to convey that to Perkins (MM).
As to your particular argument...
They cut the CN alignment description from 130 words to 23. An argument that things no longer apply simply because they were cut seems absurd and I assume it's not the one you are making. They also, for example, cut that they are "an individualist" and that they "avoid authority, resent restrictions, and challenges traditions" that they don't do things simply as "part of a campaign of anarchy" and that their behavior isn't "totally random". Or similarly, a parallel cut in LE would have been removing "without regard for whom it hurts" at the end of the sentence 5e borrowed. I assume the LE don't now care about who is hurt?
So, say that they cut things - some they wanted to still be implied and some they no longer wanted to apply - because they thought it was obvious from the wording they kept. If they wanted to imply that the CN character now stood for personal freedom in general, contra to what had gone before and not implied by one following their whims, why on earth would they leave the "their" in to modify freedom? If the goal is to imply standing for personal freedom in general, then leaving out the "their" does so clearly and unambiguously. Instead they chose a qualifier. A qualifier that in the past, when they used 465% more words, meant exactly how I'm taking it.
It thus would fall to thinking that one who values their own freedom necessarily valuing others' freedom (and that the authors therefore took that view as obvious enough to overcome using the "their"). But aren't there numerous examples of those in position of authority who pass or enforce laws that restrict others, but don't view them as applying to themselves (queue up a plethora of memes about congress or the police). Similarly it feels like some cultures have gone to great lengths to explain which people are not entitled the rights that they, the select few ,should get (women voting, immigrants, slavery, etc...). In philosophy it seems that it is certainly not a given that valuing one's own individual freedom says anything about valuing freedom in general - , A. Carters "Morality and Freedom" (The Phiolosophical Quarterly, 2003) and G. Gustavvson (2008 NOPSA conference paper) spend an awful lot of time discussing individualist freedom and morality, egoism, and freedom in general in ways that wouldn't be needed if everyone who valued something for themselves valued it for everyone. In psychology, are narcissism and sociopathy both conditions that could value their own personal freedom with no regard to that of others?
That the CN "would be inclined to help those that are not free" and " would be inclined to help the downtrodden" is not implied by what they wrote on page 122 of the PhB and is emphatically contradicted by the creatures in the MM given that alignment.
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