We consider the optimization of beyond diagonal reconfigurable intelligent surface (BD-RIS)-aided multi-user (MU) cell-free (CF)-massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO) systems, where the propagation environment design achieved scattering matrix optimization is complemented by developing an efficient base station (BS) beamforming (BF) scheme that effectively exploits the latter ``engineered'' channel. In particular, we describe a fractional programming (FP) method, which based on the equivalent channel incorporating a reciprocal BD-RIS (RBD-RIS) parameterized by existing scattering matrix design methods, yielding the correspondingly optimized multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) BF weights. The proposed approach decomposes the transmit (TX) beamformer into multiple sum-rate maximization (SRM) sub-beamformers, each satisfying an independent power-constraint, such that distributed MIMO-BF scenarios can be optimally handled. Although the proposed SRM-MIMO-BF framework is independent of the specific scattering matrix design, extending the BD-RIS-aided system model to the CF-mMIMO setting requires the design of a corresponding beamforming matrix. In this context, this work investigates the impact of beamforming in reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided systems. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method for designing the MIMO-BF weights, when combined with the previously developed design of reciprocal BD-RIS (RBD-RIS) scattering matrices, outperforms existing BD-RIS-aided state-of-the-art (SotA) schemes employing existing MIMO-BF techniques, indicating that the whole contribution is more than the sum of the parts.