Also this is just source code, not the assets (at least as far as I understand it).
Could probably just require the official game to be installed too and load the assets from that directory, or might even be able to use the shared folder, but not sure if tf2 uses that, i remember l4d and css and hl2 used to.
got laid off but were relatively wealthy enough to not have massive pressure to immediately start grinding a 9-5 again
Or they were grinding 996 to get something noteworthy and impressive on thier cv so they could get another good job and quit whatever it was they had to pick up to pay the bills in the mean time...
This tbh, can always go to the downloads window in your browser and redownload it if regretted.
Or press ctrl+r in the terminal and search for the command used to download if got it using curl or something 😂