Steam does not respect user privacy, at all:
In Steam's privacy policy[1], Steam details that it collects the following user information:
Name
Address
Credit Card Number(s)
e-mail
Age
IP Address
Device Unique ID
Chat logs
Forum posts
Voice Chat Recordings
Hardware Enumeration
Steam also confirms that it shares this information with third parties. The implications of this are as follows: Steam knows your name, age, where you live, your banking information, and what your e-mail is. Steam shares this information with other companies (at least, to the extent allowed by law). Steam can use your IP Address to track where you are to the nearest county and can use your Device Unique ID provided by the fingerprinting spyware features inside Steam to track your usage habits across devices that you use. Steam also records all of your communications with others through its social networking and instant messaging services, such as all chat logs, voice conversations, and forum posts, and can share all of this information with third parties as well.
Steam is a self-updating proprietary DRM launcher. It serves 4 main purposes: act as a webview into the Steam store (in which Valve takes the lump sum of each and every transaction made), download and manage your games library through their Steam content delivery network and library UI, funnel users into its social media platform called "Steam Community" and most importantly enforce software digital restrictions via Steam DRM.
Though developers can disable steam's DRM check and users can take any number of obtuse workarounds to crack steam security: the intention is to make it so that Steam becomes the singular monopoly and model for video game distribution on PCs.
Valve has also been guilty of inducing underage gambling addictions in young children (as young as 12) and has profited immensely from pioneering the virtual "skins" economy where users spend real world money to obtain artificially scarce digital aesthetics. If your "virtual economy" has a market cap in the hundreds of thousands of real dollars then it's safe to say that you've built an extremely toxic space that preys on people's psychology. Search "CSGO and gambling" on any site and you'll find dozens of sources and documentaries on exactly how little Valve cares when it's their bottom line going up. Valve's Steam social platform also perpetuates, this, through frequent sales and advertising that's impossible to turn off. Through "Steam trading cards" that fire up the dopamine in your brain to keep buying, to keep trading, to wonder if you can fork just a little bit more to get a new game or skin.
Valve supporting "Linux" is not a plus in Valve's part but the culmination of years of thankless work by thousands of volunteers across dozens of projects to actually create a space that Valve could contribute to. In reality, Valve isn't doing anything different compared to most large tech corporations when it comes to publishing new work and making contributions.
Steam is also intentionally a terrible product on a technical level, instead of publishing a Steam API SDK for app developers: Valve has realized that creating their own google chrome-in-a-box launcher would allow them to double their launcher as an uncontested advertisement platform for all their future products. This slow, memory-intensive archaic 32-bit application for Windows and Ubuntu stays always on in the background, ready to manipulate your psychology into playing more video games and interacting with the platform as part of your daily computing use (not too dissimilar to Discord).
Steam also is, like most US-based social platforms, a vector for alt-right reactionary content to spread. The content moderation guidelines in Steam are guided by how far Steam knows it can take it and again, are not so different to any other tech corporation.
I'm sure some 
will come and defend their treats and how steam is the lesser evil and all that and how it's bullying to come after their treats, but I don't care, you're perpetuating harm by using Steam. You've given up before you've started and have become dependent on a multinational corporation who can and will get away with it again and again.
I've had a steam account before, it had hundreds of games that I've accumulated through years of Steam summer sales (probably hundreds upon hundreds of dollars in value in games alone). I decided to delete my steam account because I wasn't comfortable having my entertainment outlet be under the whim of a company who represents everything I hate about the tech industry.
I started to read/listen to theory, I take walks, started a fitness routine, I enveloped myself in indie webcomics. I pirate all my games and have a retro-game library at my fingertips. Life got a lot simpler once the "[[ 90% ]]" tag was being blasted in my face when I opened the Steam app, manipulating me into buying slop I won't even play or enjoy
We need to start supporting game developers directly, cut out the parasitic middleman, because sure as shit you're not supporting your favorite games when they take an enormous 30% revenue cut just for their monopoly.
Naturally, it's not on the same level as groceries, but you don't need a smartphone to live either, you don't need an instant messenger to live either. But they are part of modern life anyway.
OFC there are free/libre and secure instant messengers, while such gamestores do not exist.
IMHO we do not need to be full time revolutionaries 24/7, using the least inavsive platform for recreation is not such a bad thing.
I don't know what kind of video games you play, but to me it is very often a social activity.
I like to play multiplayer games that require two teams to coordinate against each other. I like to play coop games with others. I like to play local multiplayer games over Steam Play Together (which is a wonderful feature that streams your games to others and they can do inputs over that Stream and only one person needs to "own" the game).
What I mean to say, as a platform that facilitates social life, proprietary game stores have no alternative like with instant messengers, as I mentioned. Steam is just the most useful and "friendly" of the whole bunch.
It was a play at "~~american~~ burgerlandian exceptionalism". I meant that I don't think Steam is somehow exceptionally worse than any other company that seeks to maximise profits and exploitation. Like any other such company they sees all methods available, in the digital industry that includes gambling. That is an unfortunate fact, but if you can hide gambling behind vibrant colours and pixels it's very easy money, it's unfortunately the industry standard.
But then again, in Valves' games it is never required for anything other than cosmetics. It is entirely optional.
The advantage that Steam has as a non-shareholder beholden company, is that they maximise revenue in the long term instead of shooting themselves and their users in the foot thanks to quarterly profit quotas
I understand that you want to counter the hype and stanning of Valve, it's not the "saviour of Gnu/Linux", but the Linux kernel exists in it's current form only thanks to corporate sponsors and companies needing and contributing to it. Same with a lot of open source projects. If Valve has a symbiotic relationship with the Gnu/Linux space, I don't think it's particularly bad.
A lot of their stanning is unjustified, but it's understandable, since (unfortunately, as in that the rest isn't) they are among the most open and "friendly" companies in the digital and hardware/accessory industries.
Just to clarify: I don't think Valve should be the model for anything, that it is much commendable or anything like that. Ideally it wouldn't exist and neither would any capitalist industry