What's the benefit of this? Cracking an online game that is free anyway

Am I missing something important here? Something new was achieved regarding the topic, or this is just a "hey, a reminder that valve games can be cracked too" kind of thread? Luckily, always been a common practice to archive old versions of all CS games. CS:GO in particular was always "cracked" with RevEmu (as the usual emulator of choice and shared on RIN as usual, to give one common example. Some sites used to share similar builds with every item unlocked, custom unofficial server lists and blahblah. It's the reason why we still can play some versions from even 2012! Which is cool since they removed most maps some years later for some reason. 😔