Black Mesa is beautifully done but combat is not as well balanced as the original game; there are odd spikes in difficulty at certain points that will have you cursing.
Players new to the series would be better served by playing the original Half-Life than Black Mesa.
> older devs had to go into management to keep their career trajectory ... FAANG companies seem to have figured it out for people they've already hired.
The FAANG companies and other technology platform companies have separate technical and management career tracks. Only those who want to be managers become managers.
> Or you could argue that it originated with Unix coming out of Bell Labs and being passed around universities on reels of tape, with new extensions contributed along the way.
That was not motivated at all by the open source movement. The only reason AT&T Bell Labs didn't charge a significant amount for UNIX is because they were under a consent decree which precluded them from entering other industries at the time, see https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/should-we-thank-...
> I kind of expect that the "let consumers be the beta testers and fire all our QA" approach is going to majorly bite them in the ass at some point and lose a lot of goodwill.
I wish I could agree with you. However, the QA layoffs at Microsoft were in 2014; if something like was going to happen, it would have happened by now.
For those curious, the Xeon Ds are designed for low-power servers; one can get a 8 core/16 hyperthread D-1541 that has a TDP of 45W. Makes for a nice home server but Intel has been charging a lot for them. AMDs offering will hopefully be a good alternative that's more reasonably priced.