At this point it’s mostly just the community doing updates and valve greenlighting what the community makes

the valve ethos is, and has been “the community can do a better job than us, let’s enable them”

TF2 shipped with 6 maps and zero cosmetics. While valve developed some game modes and some maps, there are a bunch of the maps that came with the post launch updates that are community made, as well as bucketloads of cosmetics. TF2 is currently F2P, and does give money back to the creators…

the argument there is, is the valve cut too high for what they get? is some better than none? should it just be mods?

That’s kinda how Killing Floor 2 got updates except Tripwire used a third party to manage making popular Workshop uploads official for years.

Still going strong since the update last year, i think i only saw a hacking bot once by playing regularly in the last year.

From a player perspective, bots are not a problem at the moment. TF2 is back to its usual chaos, so that’s good.