Aus for example community servers get full quick, there is a pro league going with multiple divisions, and then those who try brave casual servers as well.
Aus alone would have over 500+ players regularly playing daily.
How is Valve pumping up the concurrent player count not a bigger news story? That is like the metric for calculating popularity of a game and Valve is openly fudging the numbers without anyone caring. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
Botters have gone from aimbotting and afk item farming to basically crowding public lobbies with their bots, then using ai to voice spam slurs and "confessions of illegal activities" in the voice of people trying to bring attention to the bot problem. The botters have also done both doxxing (impersonating said people and spamming their personal info as well as using ai voice chat spam to get people to do vigilante action against innocent people), swatting (see previous), as well as using their majority in a server to kick anyone that tries to combat them.