[sershe]

I think the GP means steam "ecosystem".

Over the last 10 years and 1000+ of hours of gaming, I've literally never used a single "feature" or had a single positive interaction with steam other than downloading the games (for which a zipped installer would have worked just fine), yet I had many cases where I couldn't play because steam forced update but couldn't download it due to slow connection/really wanted to go online on the plane because offline mode used to be buggy/had the update install and completely break steam/couldn't login/connect to valve servers, etc.

They were fixing these but new stuff always comes up (and is 0% justified), and some stuff is by "design" e.g. "offline" mode still installs steam updates. At this point I have steam completely firewalled out and I turn that off only when I want to get a specific game or a DLC.

Steam is malware (so are Win10 ads, forced updates, etc.)