Valve is generally supportive of mods (hell, a Portal 2 mod was just released a few days ago) but it seems like recreating Team Fortress 2 was pushing it... Really sad, honestly. I really hope Valve would just strike a deal with these devs and make it official rather than throw away the insane amount of effort they put into re-building TF2.
I'd be more supportive of Valve if Team Fortress 2 wasn't a dumpster fire to play in 2024. The game is infested with bots that make anything outside of independently moderated community servers unplayable.
Even Counter Strike 2 has dogshit anticheat despite the boasts that VAC Live was a solution that could surpass Vanguard, to the point where the only good competitive experience you can have is to play on FaceIt or ESEA servers with their own ring 0 anticheat solution.
If you can only have a good experience by installing malware, you don't have a good experience.
I really should finish building that nvidia jetson based hardware anticheat that'd allow anyone to cheat even in vanguard protected games with perfect accuracy for just ~150$. Ring 0 anticheat's only use is to spy on you and yet people will continue defending it until someone's proven just how useless it is.
Can only speak for the higher ranks of both games but cs2 is currently unplayable above 25k elo since its almost guaranteed to have 1 out of 10 players cheating.
While i only encounter a few cheaters each season in immortal in Valorant.
I mean TF 2 is 16 years old. They just don't really support it anymore. I can't comprehend how it's still in or close to the top 10 steam games by player count when it's been dead for years.