The original list was surely not perfect, it reflected the biases and idiosyncrasies of the people who worked on it (for example, I think my input is pretty much the main reason Bdonski is crazy high because I always had a really high opinion of him, whereas I know botmode disagreed even at the time when he went over the list). It also probably had a bias towards any player that had been on the very top, even if it was literally just for a year in 2008. But, as others have said, some of these criticisms are unfair, for three main reasons:
1) People are underestimating just how much has changed in 4 years. The G6 dynasty is obviously the best example of this.
2) As market said, there is a big difference between evaluating the objective skill of players vs. evaluating everyone in the context of their era. I think we're all comfortable giving a boost to players who are the best in the modern era when the skill level is the highest (and I think any reasonable person would agree it's the highest now), but that's still only one facet of evaluating players. Jokic might just be the most skilled center in NBA history, but you won't see many people rank him over Kareem yet, because we're just too early in his career to write the full story.
3) A point that I think has gone unaddressed: I think everyone has a bit of rose-colored glasses for the era when they first started watching competitive, while they were still a giant noob compared to the best of the best. For Tery or SpaceCadet or myself, that era was very early on in the game's lifespan. But for a lot of the naysayers here, that era was like 2015-2018, and I think there's some of that going on here too. For instance, hannah said in her post that she thought corsa being 'only' 41st was egregiously low. We're talking about a player who, results-wise, never won a single season of ESEA/RGL, or made the finals of a major international tournament.
Of course, that's not the whole story; corsa was a highly respected player who was considered one of the most skilled scouts in his time period, and that was probably the period that hannah started watching. If we're talking objective results, for instance, corsa would be clearly behind someone like cyzer or tyrone, who won multiple seasons of ESEA and got 2nd place at i46. Yet, talk to anyone around at the time, and neither of them were considered as elite on their class as corsa. That's why you need a blend of criteria, right? But I think that sort of color is kind of lost when you're talking about the earlier eras of tf2, where old farts might remember, say, how influential a roamer like jaeger was, on top of him being on the most dominant team.
On the flip side, hannah complains that Muma is too low, and points to his accomplishments. But we could just as easily point out that he was on the rebuilt froyo after everyone left, one of the weakest versions of the team, and that he totally imploded at that international LAN to the point that b4nny was literally trying to get WARHURYEAH to replace him at the event. If you go by placements, maybe 95 IS far too low. But would you apply that same standard to a tyrone or a Mackey, who won FAR more but who were probably even more tarred with the 'carried by b4nny' label? It's easy to pick whichever criteria supports a particular player the most, but it gets more complicated when you weigh everything for every player.
Ultimately, you'd run into the same conflict if you did this list today, just with the timelines moved up a couple years. How could anyone compare corsa or duwatna to caps or logan? At that point, it'll be the people who really grew up in that middle period of tf2 who are trying to explain just how good the previous generation was