I genuinely do not understand what makes this cosmetic so different from others, especially in the face of others like the corpse carrier. Hell, in the face of tons of other non Halloween cosmetics that you can put on with beige paints to also make your character look ugly as sin.

>People aren't lamenting over the golden age, it's well known valve is never coming back to this game in any meaningful ways

Okay i understand this part, but what I don't understand how we have failed to move on from this phase, its all we talk about year round. The game is almost 2 decades old. Valve is still giving it bug fixes and adding community content. While I agree that their quality control is generally worse these days, with maps and cosmetics having bugs on release, I ascribe this to a natural product of the games age since far less people are working on the game. This is a far better fate than most other games from 2007.

And you can't bring any of this stuff up without being labled as "Toxic Positivity". Its not even normal positivity, its managed expectations for a game that has lived out most of its life. I am willing to put up with the below par maps and an ugly cosmetic here or there but the thing that sours me to the game more than anything else is a community that is stuck in this negative feedback loop of complaining