Half of reactionary gamer rage is misdirected anger at games becoming corporatized soulless microtransaction factories made by people who get laid off every year
G*mers: this game has lackluster game play, a boring unoriginal story (if any), more bugs than an anthill, has clearly suffered from rushed development and crunch time, and is basically a half-assed excuse for the endless stream of microtransactions and cosmetics shoved in my face, why am I not having fun? It must be all the DEI feeeemales and minorities!
Lol there’s a mod that makes Demoman white, but all it does it just make him look like a black albino person because it only changes the skin color and nothing else
At the time racists focused on white women dating black men and were hanging around neo-nazi circles irl. The fash to internet groyper screaming about black people on 4chan pipeline was still being set up.
Alyx was one of the few major female characters in games at the time that wasn't sexualized by the developer in some way. So then s went on to build "Cinematic Mod" for Half-Life 2 a year later, which among other things replaced Alyx's character model with a new "high definition" one that gave her big boobs, cleavage and an exposed midriff to make pp hard.
I think tf2 usually gets ignored when it comes to this topic because it is sorta kinda satire, the characters aren't really intended to be self inserts or idealized empowered people, they are looney tunes caricatures with the gender expectations of the era being satirized baked right in
Not trying to say it's actually woke and diverse, just that people seem to care less about a lack of diversity when the characters are all characters instead of them being templates for expression
Internet grifters were definitely around for Half Life: Alyx. However, I am shocked by how chuddy steam is without there being major reactions to them doing this. Especially with CS2 and Rust (valve adjacent FacePunch).