To be fair you have to realize how much more dependent the global economy is on software nowadays. Halo was a Bungie product, and when Bungie left as Microsoft took it over yeah, the product had loftier business goals that needed to be protected. Smaller devs can't really reach critical market saturation anymore like they used to.

You can criticize where things has gone with MTX but I don't think that was a choice by the game developers. I also think it's a generational thing as you and I are now too old to spend all day fucking around with some game we played a ton. I'm sure the kids of today are tinkering with minecraft/fortnite/whatever replaced those games.

Also to me it's a bit of wanting to try and put the tooth paste back in the tube. When we were teenagers modding Halo we maybe didn't fully understand the impacts it had on the game's community and the overall experience. As an adult I just see how games like Call of Duty appear to be constantly losing the fight against hackers, and using over engineered matchmaking algos with SSBM to try and maximize the typical user's gameplay experience. But I can't regain my naivety and be one of the many younger adults who probably don't even really notice these issues, the way I didn't when I played Halo 3 on Xbox Live which had boosting, standby, and stealth servers.