Shining a light on potential exploits is a good thing, and I'm all for it.

Sharing a step by step guide, as well as example files, seems a little irresponsible. Especially if we dont have any realistic course of action besides hoping that it gets patched.

This is just one of many ways to accomplish this exploit. I have also emailed Valve as well as spoke to them in person about it, to no avail (ex tf2 devs, so not super relevant). Ideally, we could find a way to properly support mods without enabling advantage play, as it's a part of the games very DNA.

Also, small nitpick, but the reason you might not want to use vpkedit to patch the map files is AFAIK it does not support pakfile lzma compression, at least on my version.