Regarding the sudden influx of "revolutionary" mods - what most people don't realize:
If you have been active in the BeamNG community over the past couple of months, you could very easily have noticed the sudden influx of various mods that were once deemed pretty much impossible to make - now being released as many of their authors' first mods. Many of these people, when asked about the use of AI, will either ignore your question or tell you that it was only used "a small bit" during the development process, when you can quite clearly tell that this is not the case for many of these projects.
To be clear, this is not an anti-AI post by any means. i AM against such deceptive use of it, but with this post, I moreso wanted to discuss the infamous "devs hire this guy!" comments that appear under every mod thread of this kind.
I agree with you that many of these mods do in fact look cool! But outright saying that the modder is doing the BeamNG developers' job for them and advocating for their hiring is silly and can be harmful to both sides. These mods are NOT "dev-quality." Even Stenyak has briefly gone over this topic recently (as seen in the 3rd image), which thankfully shows that they, too, can tell real human effort apart from AI-assisted projects.
The reason I said that such comments can be harmful to both sides is because, at the end of the day, mods are supposed to be well-built both on the outside AND the inside! Giving mods that take AI shortcuts such massive praise is just begging for the modding standard to drop significantly, as actual skilled modders are not physically able to churn out huge, game-changing mods and updates to them every week. So, at that point, why should they bother anymore when something that an AI created is on the front pages of the community every day?
And from there on, YOU, the player, will be feeling the consequences when the repo has hundreds of new mods a month, each being insanely unoptimized and filled with tons of values for you to configure.
The devs are working on scratches, the devs are working on particles, and much much more behind the scenes. Allow them do it properly, please!