These are not people ripping off TTD to make a buck. If you absolutely love the game so much that you spent 20 years modding it, you're going to have some respect for the original and the publisher and are probably glad they are interested again.

I get that it's not the same Atari as it was 30 years ago. But I liken it to you being a Beatles cover band and the estate of John Lennon reaches out to you, you're going to treat them with some sort of respect.

See also what happened with Tron 2.0, where Disney unexpectedly published a software patch 20 years later that obsoleted the community work necessary to get it running on modern Windows 10+. The community was ecstatic, not offended, that the IP owner had randomly decided to contribute. Sure, a lot of their work was either disrupted or nullified, but that's not someone 'ripping off' the community's investment — that's someone validating the community's investment. Given how other companies act, 'validation and cooperation' after a long drought of inattention is perhaps the least likely outcome here. It's so nice to see it.

(Of course, in an ideal world, companies would not be wholly inattentive to older properties — but that's basically unsolvable without economic-level solutions for the problems of capitalism, so I don't have any ideas specific to video games to offer.)