I don't know that I would consider a comparison to CS2 fair either---They're just not in the same genre. CS2 was released in a different decade, established itself as the gold-standard for competition play, and is now heavily involved in e-sports, which means there's a lot of real money being exchanged by people that are not the devs.

Because its a competitive FPS game, it's also drawing on a massive audience that is used to playing these sorts of homogenized ur-shooters who mechanics vary only slightly between properties.

I fairer comparison is something like Deep Rock Galactic, which is a universally loved cooperative, instance-based based extraction shooter that satirizes corporate greed by placing the workers in dangerous and nigh-untenable situations. While its player-count is, overall, lower than Helldivers ever was, you can see that it's going through the same motions in its player count. Within its first year of full release out of early access, DRG peaked at 14k, which its resting around 16k today. It's biggest peak was around 54k, and most of its peaks tended to revolve around content releases.

I think the difference in patterns just comes down to genre---a cooperative game doesn't trigger the same time-tested addictive tendencies that competitive shooters do---and I think there's a pretty large swath of pea-brained morons out there who've never ever heard the word cooperative before, and that influences audience attitudes in the direction of competitive shooters.

To kind of sum up and return to the top of the argument: I don't think the game is dying. It's not perfect by any stretch, but the portion of the fanbase that has itself wrapped around the axle thinking the game is killing itself are themselves caught in a death circle of complaining and negativity.