It's obvious why they stopped it eventually (pldecal.wad pretty much became obligatory porn sprays everywhere), but those were the days.
Dusty Dunes in Holland FTW :)
In retrospect it's hard to see how the game wasn't more plagued by cheats than it already was, but again it comes back to learning which servers were good servers and had active moderators who could ban people who were obviously cheating, and the less obvious probably just got away with it but were by definition less disruptive.
Of course, that also led to third party tools like PunkBuster in the end whose function then was later centralised with VAC.
GoldSrc games/mods were the golden age, and I will die on this hill. I preferred Natural Selection over CS, and it was just as moddable. It was the best. I was suited up in Mjolnir armor, wielding the pulse rifle from Aliens, blasting the soldier bugs from Starship Troopers.
Oh please. That's corporate apologia.
I mean, yeah, those concerns are real but 99.9% of the reasons they aren't doing it anymore is that having a monopoly over servers give them better control over monetization.
By the end there was literally one CS server I trusted to be friendly and busy and not running "rpg-mod" or "zombie-mod" or a thousand other adjustments I didn't like, such as "no-awp", "price adjusted" etc.
Just finding a vanilla experience became difficult, doubly so if you wanted more than "dust/dust2 only".
Add in the fact that these servers could send your computer files (in theory just maps, sounds and decals, but difficult to secure of course), and you can see why companies shy away, not just to have greater control of the experience.