Freeest or freest

I wrote this sentence:  "Hong Kong was one of the freeest cities on earth".  My automated spell checker flagged "freeest", so I changed it to "freest", and the spell checker let that stand.  But in my mind I was still saying "free‧est", with two syllables, whereas when I see "freest", it's very hard for me to think of that as having two syllables.  So how are we to pronounce the superlative degree of the adjective "free"?

Relevant entries from Wiktionary here:

Adjective

freest

1. 1. superlative form of free: most free quotations ▼

Verb

freest

1. 1. (archaic) second-person singular simple present form of free

and here:

Adjective

freeest

1. 1. Misspelling of freest. quotations ▼

Similar considerations pertain to the comparative degree of the adjective "free", viz., "freeer" vs. "freer".

Everywhere I see "freeer" and "freeest" described as "common misspellings".

Here's a post on the subject by Jakub Marian on his blog, Jakub Marian's Language learning, science & art:

"‘Freeer’ vs. ‘freer’ (triple ‘e’) in English"

This is a common mistake in English. Since the comparative form of an adjective is formed by simply sticking “er” to the end of an adjective (apart from a few irregular adjectives like “good/better”), learners and native speakers alike sometimes think that when something is “more free”, it should be “freeer”. The truth is that there is not a single word in English whose standard spelling would contain “eee”. The simple rule is:

For example, “most free” would be “freest”, not “freeest”. Note, however, that “freest” is pronounced as if it were written as “freeest”, i.e. /friːɪst/. The same goes for “freer”, pronounced as /ˈfriːə(r)/. “Free” is in fact the only adjective ending in “ee”, apart from compound words formed from it, e.g. “carefree” which are not comparable, so there are no words like “carefreer”….

It seems that, in this case, orthographic estheticism rebels at, and wins over, strict phoneticism.