Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do not understand your question. But my point is that things are not done by magic. Someone works on them, someone gets the material (if it is a product). Someone spends time. If a machine does it, someone created the machine (it is usually many people for a single industrial machine) and someone bought it. There is literally always, someone, at some point in time that paid with time and/or money to trade something…
> There is literally always, someone, at some point in time that paid with time and/or money to trade something. But how did the trade get started? Does it go back into an infinite past? An infinite series of trades, with neither an end, nor even beginning? Otherwise it would seem something must be free. Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creatio_ex_nihilo
I do not think it is difficult to see the beginning of these patterns, they seem relatively natural to me: if I can plant a big field of potatoes and you can hunt well, we assess the cost of each activity and x kg of potatoes equal y kg of meat.
I think you are mixing the fact of something being free as in "no money involved" with the fact that time is "money" or that spending time doing something is also money: it is consuming time, which is also a kind of capital.
So you could pay in coins, in sheep, in yarn, with your time or in whatever. That is not important, it is still an exchange and equivalent to trading.