Despite having free will there are things God wants us to do and not do, because they are good and bad. Now we have 2 options, either trust God or see for ourselves where the things God told us are bad lead to. Since we are ignorant jackasses that think to know everything better we chose the second option and now need to see that the fire is actually hot and that this bad.
Now is the time where we are able to burn ourselves, learn that these things God told us are bad are actually bad and what this "bad" actually means, perdition and destruction, so that we realize that God was right about every single thing. This is why so much bad must happen, so we see with our own Eyes where it gets us and thus forsake it and follow God with our free will instead of through force.
God could have corrected everything from the beginning, but in a few Aeons the next guy would get the same idea and try the same again, and again. Only by living through this now, seeing it with our own eyes there will noone be able to argue against what is good anymore.

Also think of the story of Job
In this case imagine Satan as the older brother. He is mad the we, the smaller brother get attention even though we are, on the cosmic scale, just sucking our thumb and drool a lot. So Satan throws a fit to get our fathers attention, and a 3rd of the angels agreed.
Satan claimed we dont deserve the attention, we only follow him and praise him because we have all these good things. So Satan too has to learn about him being wrong. He is permitted to throw his fit, tolerated. He takes Jobs livestock, wealth, health, family and everything but his life. He will then see that he still praises God in the end, that the praise and worship is genuine love, that he was wrong about us Humans being such low creatures and that here too, God was right again.
This is playing out in front of us all right now globally.