It can have its place, I have no problem with "others" using 3rd party software for every individual game they want to use mods with. I just personally as an average gamer don't like be forced to dig and find "software" and mods over forums (like this) to be able to play my games with mods. Steam workshop makes everything super easy for me. If a game forces me to find mods out of Steam, dig into forums and whatnot, I tend to skip it. Civ7 is the only exception in my gaming library, where I take this kind of treatment from the devs. Same reason why I dont play old school games like Red Alert 2 or C&C generals, they just failed miserably to keep up with the existing paradigm of Steam, and you need tons of mods/patches to make them work in multiplayer. You need to download clients, create accounts, patch the game (in a specific order) and whatnot. Seriously, I am too old for this kind of stuff. Definitely, not worth my time. It should just work on Steam, plug-and-play. No need to advocate for something else to be the norm. If there are people who want to dig for that out of Steam - fine, they can do that. But this shouldn't be the norm for ALL players in the world.