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-...