indeed, the appeal to the general audience, whether they're casual gamers or hardcore ones, is important and done well in the Bethesda games, thanks to the good modding tools & the ease of moddability of the game, as well as a huge variety of mods, going from the downstraight silly to the immersive and serious ones.
we need stuff like this:
i know i know, it's borederline blasphemous, but that's one of the things that modding need to attract the attention of the general public. that, and better modding tools.
its not just a matter of lack of tools or CDPR support, its also a matter of audience, Witcher fans/audience is *mostly* more mature ( and smaller ) than fans of bethesda games for examples, the younger audience wasnt attracted because of F4 or the very early bethesda games, but rather because of how easy it was to mod Skyrim from the get go years ago, and make stupid random stuff and put that on youtube, there are mods wich literally only exist to be youtube bait clicks, and then you have youtubers who's channel are purposly made to promote and make money off of those randoms mods
its more complexe matter than " lol cdpr u suks, u no redkit ùùù$$ "
Also the Witcher serie is more story driven then gameplay driven, with a strong protagonist and a world built specifically around his story, there isnt much room to mod and create those " random " mods, the existence audience has no interest in them to begin with, and because the game is vastly more polished and i would say simply " better " in every aspect than bethesda games, again you dont have much room to " create mods while fixing " , obviously the UI was far from good for example, but beside that there isnt much to fix simply
i tend to think that random mods are usually tied to boring and unpolished games ( again typical bethesda games or any sandbox games wich W3 is not ), but one could say what about GTA ? i think that GTA is in its own league, the exception that can not be taken as an example, too old, too big, with budgets out of this world
personally i would be very sad if i start to see thos random sonic mods in W3, i dont even find them funny
sometime you gotta accept the devs decision for not wanting their game to become a broken sandbox fest, not only they dont get money out of that ( look at what bethesda tried to do with steamworks mods ) but at the end i believe it break the game image/magic/charm after a while, and it get even worse when you dont even control that, that sonic mod on skyrim that you linked is the best example
if one care only about money they wouldnt care about the integrity of their IP, if they do care about it, its sad to say it but they have to put some limits as to what a user can mod and what he cant