Funnily enough, on Half-Life 1 engine-based games (i.e. the engine that came before HL2 - on which Team Fortress 2 runs; such as Counter-Strike 1.6), a different allocator problem exists -- glibc's malloc() just decides to fail miserably[0] on some setups.
[0] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/halflife/issues/3158