Appreciate the insight, very disappointing! Sadly, TF2 is in a practically unmaintained and unplayable state right now and it's a game that is still beloved by its fans all these years later. Any efforts to inject life back into the fanbase seem to be met with indifference from Valve at best and outright callous opposition at worst.
I don't have any insider insights on Team Fortress 2 in particular, just licensee or Valve Business Development topics.
The current public consensus on that subject though is that there are people at Valve that like Team Fortress 2 and work on it, but it doesn't win them any brownie points during things like peer review for bonus purposes like the clout you'd get for working on the Dota 2 or CS2 teams.
I consider the lack of effective anticheat as essentially making the game unplayable/abandoned, regardless of whether or not they fix minor bugs or localization issues.
TF2 is my favorite game, and basically the only game I play. While playing on Valve servers can be troublesome in off hours, its usually bot free when playing during peak times. Also there are tons of community servers that are completely bot free all the time, so while valve may have mostly abandoned the game it is completely playable.
