It’s a good thing for a marketplace to have many options. As long as steam keeps discovery working well then its totally fine. Lots of people throw up their first game (from a game tutorial) onto steam as a learning experience, they aren’t expecting to make any money. Posting your highschool programming project on steam feels cool.

Sure if the code is open you can just build it yourself. And if 2.00 builds go open in a time window it’s just time gating.

But your right the incentives are to keeping pumping out a parade of changes to make donating seem worthwhile to get early access

Maybe they could do a model where the mod is free but updates or builds for the first 3 months are behind a totally optional donation fence.