I never thought I'd read a thread and the only person I agree with is SpaceCadet, but here we are.
It feels like a lot of players want to really undervalue past players compared to current players for whatever reason, to me at least. I've never understood how people can value being better now compared to in the past, when the whole point of comparing eras is to rank players relative to the skill level at the time they played. I guess part of why people find it difficult to grasp the concept here is because our top player has been the same person for ~15 years. Try to imagine a world where b4nny quit at the same time as mix^, or consider the fact nobody has any significant problem with clockwork's ranking, despite not seriously playing since I was in high school. B4nny would obviously still be our goat. I'd also like any of the people who act like older players just sucked compared to people like Jay, to consider that a significant number of players were using 60 hz monitors, wired mice, trash mousepads, and didn't even know what a mechanical keyboard is. The setups we used to play maplestory and pubs on, people were unironically trying to compete in tf2 with lol. Seriously, play a pub now with your old dell mouse, monitor, and keyboard, and let me know how it goes. Also, for the zoomers, please keep in mind when tf2 had lan finals at esea, the game was objectively more competitive. There were way more people playing and way more people trying really hard, just to go to lan. Nowadays our best players don't even play most of the time... look at the current state of invite.
Players like Tyrone and Mackey are incredibly overrated, not because they played in an era where people were way worse mechanically (no shit), but because they actually just sucked in their era lol. Or, like in the case of alexwut, they were only good for a short amount of time (sorry alex it you're reading this, I don't actually know if you were good for more than just 2008). Just like how a player who was only good in 2015, 2020, or 2025 probably shouldn't be in consideration for "top 100 player of all time". I'd rate someone like kobe, or soapy higher than those people because they showed that they can reach the pinnacle of our game, and sustain that for a consistent period of time, not because the years they've been dominant in is in the 2020s. In my opinion at least, it'd be equally as impressive if G6 replicated their success in 2014.
Edit: holy nerd essay, sorry, been playing this game since I was a kid so I had a lot of thoughts