The Dota 2 Arcade Situation with SUNSFan and Jenkins
In case you haven't heard, the Dota 2 Arcade is going kinda nuclear due to Valve demanding everyone stop monetization. There's a lot of why-what-who going on surrounding it so they made this video as an explanation of what's going on.
I think the problem is exactly as you said, the way the games were monetized is forcing Valve to step in. Now, somehow (money🤫😉) they’re cool with gambling, but not anything which gives an unfair gameplay advantage in their games.
CS has servers where you can get all sorts of stuff by being a member, but they’ve never reached the levels of popularity of games like autochess. Dota’s main F2P stance is that all gameplay is free and fair, even with them stating recently that they want to add more generic content that benefits all players. I don’t think Valve wants to shut these game modes down, and perhaps they have something in mind moving forward for the Arcade.
(My personal hope is that this is the case, and CS:2 will have an Arcade introduced for the great hidden game modes that exist and will be made with Source 2)