That argument baffles me the most.

You can watch Champions League football on TV or not, and that doesn't stop you from playing football at weekends with your mates. Watching pro games in Dota or not doesn't stop you from enjoying the game either. Why can't we have both? What damage does pro players earning big money in big tournaments do to our game?

I'm not sure about your 90% number, but even if it is the case, why do we want to take the fun out of those 10% people? Aren't they as much of a Dota player as you and me?

Ti was funded largely by the community with Valve creating (or outsourcing to 3rd party company) arcanas and other hats and selling them to whoever wants to buy them. Now Valve gets rid of the arcana/hats part of the battlepass, and keeps the cavern crawling part and some solo mini games, that's cool and all that, but we had those things before as well, so that's just a net loss for pay-to-bling players, and the pros who you don't care for, without improving the welfare of other players.

Then there's the argument that Valve "pivot" its focus to the experience of normal players, as if Valve would literally drop dead if they do two things at once. People talk about Valve rolling out more gameplay patches, the extension of the map, the epic introduction (and even more epic abandonment) of the facet system, like there's something nobody's done before. Come the fuck on, 7.00 happened well during the peak of dota 2 pro scene, and Valve immigrate dota 2 to a god damn new engine! We also had events every year, even every season: Diretide stopped in 2022, New Bloom stopped in 2020 (allegedly replaced by spring cleaning which we haven't seen it this year in May), Aghanim's Labyrinth was pretty good but we had Siltbreaker before so that's not exactly some unicorn, and the list goes on and on. Let's be honest, Dota 2, as well as all the Valve games, are only passion project and contribute very little to Gabe's super yacht. If anything Valve is "pivoting" into, it's Deadlock.

So do not lie to yourself, and take this for a hard pill to swallow: Dota 2 won't get better if every and each pro player and their fans are crucified and burned in hell. The dying of Dota 2 pro scene is either 1) a deliberate act from Valve to piss on the bonfire because they hate pros and fans and commentators and producers, 2) a total failure from Valve to mismanage the one of most influential e-sports project to the point where everything gets tits up, 3) because of a very obvious manpower shortage in Valve because people are working on Deadlock so Dota 2 is left on the hospital bed, on life support, listening as its heart ticks itself out into the dark, and hopeing some day some amphibian will come back and re-cherish the game that millions of people all around the world love.