I'm assuming this was done last minute as it was not in the initial announcement on the livestream or in the post. But a few days ago in a different thread at least me but I think others were mentioning that for a subset of players the free 7* thing in this sale event was basically just 600-1200 titan shards and therefore didn't mean as much and felt bad.
But the event in game is actually a selector between thing or a saga 7* crystal which is actually nice. So thank you kabam for throwing that subset of players a bone.

*kudos withdrawn if this was part of the event the entire time and you just decided to not share the information for some reason