I think you could use the "it's not so great already" argument both ways. You are saying that this is not a huge deal because the situation is already not great so it will only get a little worse. I would argue that it is a big deal because there is already so little left of the "enjoyment" factor of short/medium haul Y that by removing free food and drink, they are effectively taking away almost everything they could (bar a standard sized cabin luggage which will presumably be next). So I guess for you it's not huge because the starting point is low, for me, it's significant because this is really most of what was left.

Rightly or wrongly, to me, a switch from "you are our guest, we are trying to make your flight enjoyable even with a free offer that has gone down quite a lot compared to the 1990s" to "you are a captive customer, we will see if we could take a bit more of your money whilst you are stuck with us" is an important change. Of course, the best way to limit the change is to not buy (what I already do on BA - as you rightly suggest, if I'm really going to buy anything then I'll buy from the airport rather than feed their little racket).

Having said that, whilst I am more offended by the move than you, and whilst I feel that for connecting passengers, notably those on relatively premium tickets, this will be a significant change, one thing I do have to acknowledge is that this was largely inevitable the moment LH decided to follow in the steps of BA on that sad direction. There is an obvious game of chickens between the big three and in this particular case, BA took out the guns first. There is arguably little reason for AF to stick to free offering when none of the competition does and that, I suspect, pragmatically spells the end of any argument about it because it's not as though it would make sense for AF-KL to foot a cost all of their big competitors don't in an ultra-competitive market.

It is noteworthy that BA had to slightly reverse their initial take on BoB (they used to give nothing, they reintroduced small bottles of waters and a packaged snack for free, as well as a slightly more substantive meal on longer flights - typically above 3.5 hours or so). It looks like AF-KL are emulating that model when it comes to retaining at least a minimal free offering and I guess they might decide to also keep a small meal of sorts on the longest routes like IST, TLV, ATH and the likes though interestingly, HEL and LIS are certainly not amongst the shortest routes in the medium haul network and I wonder if AF may have purposefully chosen to test the concept on the sort of route where it might hurt due to length rather than on - say - GVA or LHR..

In any case, I can only hope that if people are not happy with the move, they will complain after their flights and won't buy what AF will offer them unless they think it is good quality and good value which t almost certainly won't be. Lastly, I had to laugh when they communicate that premium pax should not worry as the brilliant service in C will remain unchanged. To me, AF C within Europe has progressively become the worst of any European major and whilst AF Y within the same was, in my view, the best of them, it will now simply be aligned with the extremely poor premium offering. Currently, AF long haul products actually tend to be pretty good (except W) but I would not bet that this will necessarily last very long because historically, when the airline has gone down with products (regardless of the magnitude), it has had a tendency to work a bit like a spiral (till some new CEO ends up realising that they went too far after X years).