[ThatPlayer]

I think the community servers solution wouldn't have scaled up to current markets. Back in the day with smaller userbases you'd have less casual players, more people who would be interested in administrating a server and willing to work for free. Now that gaming is mainstream and everyone does it, not everyone cares as much as people used to back then.

Counter-Strike itself still has community servers as an option. And given the choice between those servers and regular matchmaking, most players prefer the latter. This map hasn't updated in 4 years, but I doubt that has changed: https://teamwork.tf/worldmap/csgo/live