people have the misconception that heroes like antimage or whatever are all about going late. the reason heroes with farm acceleration abilities/builds are strong is because they end up ridiculously strong with 3-4 items. just like bfury/vlads/manta+one item is am's peak, sven peaks with hod/sny/blink/bkb at around the 20-21 minute mark

most people dont see the max cleave and 1 in stun build because lodas the guy whos played sven the most in competitive and he exclusively maxes stun, then warcry, then cleave. the max cleave first build isnt really applicable in pubs because it kills ur ability to fight early on (hotd does nothing compared to, say, blink) but this isnt really needed in pubs since u can get away with a lot of greed in pubs anyway.

maxing cleave lets u farm insanely fast and have a huge power peak 20-35 minutes in. u end up with hod at around 8 minutes provided u go treads first, which lets u stack ancients and clear them every time u have a 4 stack with gods strength (not needed once u get to sny)

more or less u end up being able to farm the jungle in 35-40 seconds and then a lane or ancients and so on. ive played a lot of sven in pubs recently and hes an insanely strong laner because of warcry making him immune to physical damage and him being innately super tanky and having a stun whichh lets u zone and kill offlaners easily. u can get yasha into sny by around 14 minutes most games and then u can go blink bkb daedalus or whatever u wanna do. but the big sell is by not maxing q and going 1-4-1-1 into 1-4-4-3 stats lets u end up with 2k hp 20 minutes into the game with sny and stuff. those stats make u unkillable by magic damage, pretty hard to kite, extra damage from ur ult, great farming speed and stuff. u can go blink if u need to fight earlier over sny.

more or less, maxing cleave makes him a great pub hero because its impossible to kill him if u farm well and he pushes really well an carries well.