Artstyle
Note (2025-05): I've basically rewritten this page 4 times as of now.
TF2's artstyle has drastically changed for the worse throughout the years. What was once a cartoon-ish 60s and 70s industrial setting became more and more colorful over the years, drifting further away from the original style.
My pov: currently, most known creators are mass-producing cosmetics that require the least amount of effort in the hope of a quick buck or a self-made item. This and a poor quality control from Valve has led us to where we are today. A good chunk of items that get in the game nowadays are pretty bad.
The fact that some creators feel entitled to create whatever they want as long as it gets accepted has probably forever corrupted the interactions between them and the players. Criticism towards an item is often taken as a threat, either because it is (some players will always be deranged) or more often than not because some Pavlovian conditioning kicks in. "Dramas" around cosmetics can often be rooted back to item makers making objectively bad cosmetics then being stuck up when people start calling those out for what they are: a waste of disk space.
Because yes, the artstyle really is something a portion of the playerbase cares deeply about, very vocally sometimes. The source of their worries is simple to understand: with other games always becoming more colorful to monopolize the forever shrinking attention span of gen-Z/Alpha, of course there's going to be resistance. The form it takes can be pretty retarded, yes. Items receiving the hate are often equally so.
The only way to change the workshop for the better would be to remove any incentive to make items: no more money, no more self-mades. This way (un)popular workshoppers like Square or Neodement would stop making items, bad cosmetics would appear less often, and this would give a chance to works created with actual passion behind them to be seen and accepted into to the game. Could this actually happen? No.
Item makers obviously should be seen as one of the causes of this situation, but it shouldn't be forgotten that Valve has the final say over what gets added into the game. The widespread belief that Valve is somehow different from other game companies is simply wrong. They should be viewed and treated accordingly.
All the garbage items added along the years can't be removed now, so the only sensible choices are to mentally "log out" of all of this, or massively support items befitting the standards we've known before the game's infantilization. It's sad to see that those two options are seldom taken.
