Nowadays money is not a problem for full time cheat developers - they sell the cheats (often in a monthly subscription model) to the cheaters or they sell a service where the cheater joins you in the game and does all the cheating for you (so called carry services, e.g. in escape from tarkov a cheater joins your game, kills all your enemies and lets you take all the loot).

I have seen ads for cheats where a monthly cheat subscription costs more than a new copy of the game.

I think Valve uses the spending of some amount of money as a gate to some features of Steam but the free to play games seem to be free for all.