Well, that's two different things.
Giving players the additional freedom that cheats provide is a good thing and I would like to see it in other games especially if they are also still in development. So that's what the game does right.
But I also agree that locking that feature (in this case behind a paywall) is a bad way to do it. Without cheats a lot of versions were (for me at least) unplayable as the gameplay was so unbalanced that I could not enjoy it. I would most likely not play v21 anymore if cheats were locked.
It's like other games with bad business practices. The foundation is good, but one thing is fucked so you can't have fun. Take for example the Hitman game from 2016. It came with always-online launcher shit. Nobody could play it the first weeks after launch because the servers were overloaded. The pirated version ran fine (which was obviously fully offline). The game itself is good, but they, rightfully, got a lot of shit, because the experience as a whole was bad. However, take away the one bad thing illegally and it's fine. In this analogy, I argue that the version of the game the pirates get, is good.
So what I'm saying is: The current version of the game we have access to (thanks to both the dev and the hackers) is good. I'm having fun. But there is still stuff to fix, implement and polish. I'm optimistic for the future. This game will be fire. Does the dev make bad decisions (especially from the perspective of us freeloaders)? Yes. But that is currently fixed by cracks. So it's not that important. If that changes we can go back to ranting about business practices all day long. (Or not.)
