I am someone who wishes all unlocks can be a thing and I wish all classes were competitively viable. In reality, the game cannot be played like this competitively. Cow Mangler & Jarate (outside of being straight upgrades & annoying) are too random for competitive. Unlocks like the gunslinger did not make the engineer more full time viable. The most use I've seen out of it is last second last holds & rando dicking around on evl lol. These unlocks are obviously sacrificing other peoples joy in the game for almost zero compensation. People aren't ready to play competitive TF2 because of the unlocks and Valve doesn't seem to care that we did this (even though they've been terrible with communicating with us in the first place).
Competitive is at a low point, obviously. People purely play this game for enjoyment, no one has been expecting big things for a while. I think the effort is appreciated but we've been playing our 'own game' for a long time now, and people are obviously frustrated with the new approach that some higher-up players have been trying to take. It's so much better to let a small community like ours run the game with how they like (which is with very strict unlocks) and let them enjoy it THAN act like we're a bigger game and can make such poor unfun decisions for a small amount of people to be forced with.