Free tier does not need any kind of activation or renewal.
Trial mode of any paid tier lasts for 60 days.
And even after that it will still let you log in.
So your problem has nothing to do with CHR licensing.
You are wrong. 60 day trial requires an account on Mikrotik.com and you need to login to it using the license settings in RouterOS. Says right there so in the Wiki.
60-day trial
In addition to the limited Free installation, you can also test the increased speed of P1/P10/PU licenses with a 60 trial.
You will have to have an account registered on MikroTik.com. Then you can request the desired license level for trial from your router that will assign your router ID to your account and enable a purchase of the license from your account. All the paid license equivalents are available for trial. A trial period is 60 days from the day of acquisition, after this time passes, your license menu will start to show "Limited upgrades", which means that RouterOS can no longer be upgraded.
If you plan to purchase the selected license, you must do it within 60 days of the trial end date. If your trial ends, and there are no purchases within 2 months after it ended, the device will no longer appear in your MikroTik account. You will have to make a new CHR installation to make a purchase within the required time frame.
To request a trial license, you must run the command "/system license renew" from the CHR device command line. You will be asked for the username and password of your mikrotik.com account.
If you do not activate the trial you will revert to 1Mb per interface. And it says that right there on the wiki also:
The free license level allows CHR to run indefinitely. It is limited to 1Mbps upload per interface. All the rest of the features provided by CHR are available without restrictions. To use this, all you have to do is download disk image file from our download page and create a virtual guest.