This exactly. CS has a ton of established theory built in. Some of these changes are kinda equivalent to "pawns can take in front of them" level of disruptive to the established understanding/meta.

I'm fascinated about communities who play the same game for decades and don't want any changes to "the meta".

Is CS truly so good that any change which forces someone to re-learn the ropes is unwelcome? Do they want to keep playing the same game for another decade?

I think in general the community can try games like Overwatch, Apex, Valorant, COD, BF etc. And be pretty certain that most of the features and game mechanics from those wouldn't really make CS a better game.

I think they probably want to keep CS at least on core level same for more decades. It has been around this long so something must have been done right.

But at some point, playing the same videogame with the same meta starts to feel boring, right?

I know the obvious answer is "well, chess hasn't changed (much) and people play it for their entire lives". And yes, I would eventually find chess boring too!

It's kind of like comfort food. CS has variants like gungame and deathmatch, you can have modded servers with alternate damage, fire rate, recoil, low gravity, or even mods that change it entirely and turn it into a zombie horror game or an RPG. And those are fun, but ultimately I want to return to the game I know and love.

Chess is the obvious comparison, but also so is any major sport. There hasn't been anything significantly changed about Soccer, Basketball, Baseball, and so on, in a long time as well and most people don't have issues with that. Once you eliminate changing the game rules you're left with only trying to develop your own personal skills.

I don't know anything about CS, but in the Starcraft scene the meta is always evolving because new maps come into rotation that push players to develop new strategies. I guess LoL does something similar by adding new characters.

And this is what CS devs understood over similar FPS of that era. Other game studios would always rewrite their game from scratch and create new balance mistakes and issues (looking at you tribes) while CS made incremental improvements where knowledge typically wasn't lost between generations of players and could be passed down.

Yep, even something as small as a magazine capacity change or price for the AWP has huge effects on team strategy

Our awper ran out of bullets the other week forgetting the magazine change lol. Definitely changes the round dynamics as he can't hold the same and has to be more judicious.

(CS dropped from 10 bullets to 5)

Absolutely! Seems like there is a counter-effect to smokes (throwing a HE grenade), one could imagine something similar will happen with other grenades too. For example, maybe flashbangs ends up being dampened by a smoke as well, or something like that.