Easy on the revisionist history, there. Valve's previous attempt to introduce paid mods broke the existing mod system, and took the lion's share of the profits for Valve and Bethesda. The math on how much modders would make was absurdly low compared to the effort they put in, and most of the available mods were built on a community's worth of contributions. There was no curation, no protections for creators or consumers, and the door was left wide open for scammers and charletains to sell other people's work.

It was a terrible plan.

This isn't about players demanding work for free. Players bought the game (sometimes more than once) and many of the mods fixed significant bugs and problems. Mods provided ui improvements and new content to keep the game fresh.

Quite the contrary, this is Bethesda capitalizing on the free labor provided by the modding community over the years. This new system has already broken SKSE, upon which hundreds of additional mods are built. The SKSE team has already patched the problem, but that's just one free mod. Who compensates them for fixing the thing Bethesda broke?

People who didn't live through it and only read news articles are going to get the impression that players revolted in 2015 because everybody wants a free lunch. If it was just unhappy freeloaders, why would they have pulled the feature so quickly? Surely losing the choosy beggars all at once would not have had any effect on revenue, so how can that possibly explain the unmitigated PR disaster and public apology?