That’s always been the craziest thing to me about the US police system. In Finland the police is not legally allowed to lie to you about facts. They can lie about themselves and whatever, but not wholesale invent out of the thin air and gaslight people into believing that they did something.
I think CDPR has always been what it is now. Just that nowadays people enthusiastically jump on the internet bandwagon, whatever direction it might be, positive or negative.
That is to say, it’s the same as Owlcat. Initially buggy, but amazing and GOTY after patches. People always forget that Witcher 3 was a mess when it came out, as was Witcher 1. There was a big deal about the fact that CDPR made their big content/bug fixes updates for free with Witcher 1.
I honestly don’t remember how witcher 2 did on this spectrum, though.