In 1.6/CZ/CSS this was hardly an issue because there was a trust between players. I can understand why Valve would want to force sv_pure, but it's still annoying to have to practically pay for something that used to be free. Meanwhile, we still don't have 128 tick MM servers, the game is plagued by cheaters (and goes on…
depends Traditionally people will use a hybrid solution where their vertex color mask is modulated with a tiling noise texture - often world space - to allow for variation based on position and if you can afford it, uniquely modified vertex color. That usually holds up fine under lodding - and if not, you just fix the lods…