IMO the solution is to enable easier manual versioning management. Instead of auto updating everything, just add an update button when there’s an update available, include a rollback option, and offer downloads for popular versions instead of just the latest.

Back in the StarCraft modding days, some tools required specific versions of the game to function. The modding community figured out how to work around that by hosting the patches that got to the desired version and giving instructions (maybe even tools) for users to manage using both a specific version for mods and the latest version to play online.

The modding community was doing its own thing and didn’t expect Blizzard to adjust the way they were doing anything to make things easier. I can’t believe the sense of entitlement I’m seeing all over the place regarding this.

These broken mods were using a third party tool that reverse engineered the game’s binary to do things their modding API didn’t expose. If they wanted to be dicks about it, they might have been able to shut it down as a tos violation or tried to deliberately block it some other way. All they did was update the code, which then generates a new binary and changes all of the addresses and offsets that the tool needs to use.