Blanket statements like that are almost guaranteed never to be true because the person making them isn’t considering team need, usually with regard to things like the team’s contention window, cap situation, or positional strength/weakness.
Take your statement about Huberdeau, for example. Would he have value at 50% of his current cap hit? Possibly. But not every team would take him at that price. Some may be rebuilding and expect that he won’t be worth even his discounted price by the time they’re ready to contend. Others may be up against the cap and either unable or unwilling to make the moves required to fit him under it. Still others may decide that he simply doesn’t meet their needs and that they’d be better served allocating that cap space elsewhere. And that’s all just looking at how the player fits on a team’s roster - we haven’t even gotten into the question of what would be expected to go back the other way.
The point is there are very few realistic cases where every team in the league would take anybody, even with zero acquisition cost. The exception is star players on their ELCs as any team could free up the required cap space simply by waiving a lesser player on their roster. For instance everybody would obviously take Bedard for free. But with Huberdeau, or McDavid, or any other player with a substantial cap hit, there will almost always be at least one team that can’t use him for one reason or another.
