MMH5.5 - Heroes of Might and Magic 5.5

I'm speaking from personal experience; resources that I worked on, in one way or another, are present in many projects, mostly large ones, and I was never asked for permission to use them. My involvement is not always mentioned. Judging by what I hear from other people, it's not that I'm special; it's a common practice.

Well, then, my apologies. Maybe this is a specific characteristic of the HOMM community, although it surprises and disappoints me.
For several years, I was an active member of the modding community on Warband, and there, the absence of a detailed list of credits for a mod was rather an exception, especially among top mods.
"Piracy" occurred either among Chinese users (who like to extract resources from everywhere and put them into their mods) or among small mods, whose authors, it seems, have not quite "grasped" the ethics of modding. But this was always suppressed: such mods were banned on the first request, and the author faced shame and disgrace.
Moreover, it was generally not acceptable to take something from other mods, but only from OSP materials, which some authors specifically released for anyone who wanted them and found them useful.
Therefore, for me personally,

it is necessary to indicate the authors of the resources you use and why this is important for the development of the community.

is as obvious as 2+2=4, and I don't need to be convinced of this.)

However, the issues of "competition" do not really concern me and are not entirely clear. Resources are not "stolen" for ethical and legal reasons, not because of competition. And if someone took my work and put it into their mod, I would simply write to the administration of moddb with a request to ban that mod.
And "extracting" resources from other games is not good for reasons of competition, but because these resources are protected by copyright.
Because, otherwise, according to your logic, it turns out that if a mod/game is already cool and popular ("we, the Ubisoft team, are in different weight categories, and I can't become their competitor even if I want to"), then you can freely take assets from it.

And I know that adapting models for another game also requires effort. I myself worked on skinning free models from free3d.com for my mod.
Or recently, I encountered a situation where the Chinese extracted the armor of the Grey Wardens from DAO and put it into Warband (and released it as if it were OSP, although it is not). And one of the players in the mod I'm working on retextured them (the changes are quite significant) and, among other things, allowed me to use them.
These retextures look simply DIVINE and fit perfectly, but since the rights to the original models belong to BioWare, I cannot use them, no matter how much I want to.
And simply mentioning/thanking the original authors is not enough; you need to have their written permission.
These are the modding standards that most large modders on Warband follow.
I understand that it may seem absurd that copyright holders are still clinging to assets and engines for games from a century ago instead of releasing them for open use long ago (because they will not lose anything from this, but will only gain the love of fans) and that the only way to legally get a model, say, of some creature or armor for your mod is to create a similar reproduction from scratch, but these are the rules.

After each such outburst, I just want to freak out and delete the work that I spent the last month or two on.

If you only knew how often I felt that way.)))
And we're talking about years of work, not months.
And I worked not only on Warband.
But the truth is that I enjoy doing this (despite the sometimes completely inadequate people who, without reading the changelog for the next update, start asking stupid questions and making claims, or, based on the slightest changes to optional features, write a review "1/10, the mod is unplayable").
And, of course, it's nice to read positive feedback about the innovations I've made. That's why I keep gnawing on the cactus.
You just have to gnaw on it without double standards; otherwise, the line between who you can "borrow" resources from and who you can't becomes very blurred.