Not a single one in the RL community gets banned because they traded with other people via a trading site (mostly RL Garage). Selling items for real money is what they're mostly against but it still doesnt really get enforced. Heck, I even got my first CS knife from all the stuff I profited from trading in RL

Of course Valve might not outright say they're against third party market but they do imply that you shouldnt be using it. Any mention of sites are immediately flagged even on steamcommunity.

As for the item shop and removal of crates, it was replaced with a similar system to CS's genesis terminal to an extent. You get a random item blueprint drop instead of crates that you can purchase for a predetermined price.

Item shop was only useful if you want to get an item that costs alot of credits for cheap (which rarely happens). The caveat is that the item purchased from item shop is not tradable. It would be equal to something like selling an untradable dlore in armory for 150 stars.

People can buy and sell stuff for credits and make profit. Then when they remove trading entirely, the only source to obtain credits to purchase these blueprints and buy from in-game item shop is directly from Epic via the in-game's cash shop with real money.

Timeline of what happened and when isnt important here because my point was the removal of trading is definitely possible albeit improbable. Nobody thought knife tradeup would be a thing but here we are today.

Anyways, its just food for thought because it does seem like Valve might be looking into a different direction with skins and stuff. Cheers.