Most people agree it's great for mod authors to have paid work opportunities, but a lot of the content produced (famous weapons and armour from previous TES/Fallout games for example) already existed as free mods on sites like the Nexus, so the value proposition wasn't always there for a lot of people. Content was produced for both Skyrim SE and Fallout 4.
It was to try and solve Sony's stance on heavily restricted mod access (no new assets in particular) while also providing popular modders within the community an opportunity to be paid by Bethesda for freelance work, essentially.
