From a legal standpoint reverse-engineering is totally fine (decompiling = reverse-engineering btw)
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/reverse_engineering
What you *do* with the decompiled code could be a different story. But hey. Most, if not all, Quake mods derive heavily from copyrighted work already. Should we all just stop making mods because we're building them off of other people's work? Without explicit permission?
I don't really see the moral argument here either tbh.