Honestly, I have always been under the impression that there was not a Public with Email option for Pages, that worked the same as what’s available for Apps. Pricing and plan options for Pages has no direct correlation with pricing and plans for Apps.
With pages, if there is no sign, then you can have unlimited users. If users can or need to sign in to a page, then it falls under per user pricing or remains free to team members of the app.
I haven’t known it to be any different since pages were introduced. As far as I know, nothing has changed with the plans or pricing of glide pages since introduction. The fact that it may have worked for you may have been a bug or some kind of glitch.