Monopolies distort markets even when they act in a pro-consumer manner. For example the credit card companies. A basic credit card is really cheap and easy for the average person to use. All of the fees are actually on the business side, which is why you see businesses that still run on cash only or charge a credit card fee. The credit card network operators, (AMEX, Disc, MC, VISA) are the only option for businesses that want to accept credit cards in the US. You don't see a Debit card fee because it's actually illegal for them to pass along the Debit card processing fee.

So while the average person with the line of credit is happy about this, the businesses are not. In a normal system you would pay for the service being provided. So the person with the card would be responsible for paying to have that access.

Steam does this by making their product (the storefront) free to the average person and charging the developers money to use it. While they also effectively own your games. In a system with plenty of storefronts it might be much more common to see downloadable installation files. That's certainly one way in which they've distorted the market. That used to be very common. It doesn't help that EA, GamePass, and some others who've tried to start storefronts have repeatedly tripped over their own feet. Epic seems to be doing it but they're basically using Steam's business model because there's no other choice as long as Steam exerts it's monopoly power.

With regard to number 2. Just because a company isn’t abusing their dominant market position today, doesn’t mean they won’t tomorrow when ownership changes.

It would be preferable that market competition forced valve to be pro consumer instead of just GabeN’s good will

The other, less factual observation to make is: With the wealth of frivolous lawsuits against Valve in the past months, as well as pushes against Linux for age verification, it seems very likely that there is a well-funded group conducting lawfare to de-value the company. Whether this is simple retaliation for winning a case against a patent troll, or a long-term strategy to find a way to turn the company public and aggressively take it over, I can only guess.

Other community moderators have reported influxes of bot accounts, and it'd be naive in the age of AI to claim that all forum participants are human. Given the funding behind the attacks on Valve, I'd conclude it's entirely possible that some proportion (certainly not all) of the accounts responding on the topic of Valve are either paid astroturfers, or complete bot accounts seeking to generate negativity towards them.

Yeah, the price parity thing seems to be a big misconception here especially. The price parity guideline comes from Valve's page for Steam keys. Valve gets a 0% cut when keys are sold on third-party sites, yet they still use Valve's infrastructure, so it makes sense for Valve to not want you to price them to have all your key sales go third-party.

As far as I can tell, Valve has zero interest in how you sell copies of a game that don't use Steam keys.

Also something I noticed per their guidelines:

It's OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.

As a frequent user of IsThereAnyDeal, I can tell you it's more common than not for a game's historical low price to not be on Steam, so Valve is definitely not strictly enforcing this. With this and the lack of legalese on the page and letting developers/publishers determine what "similar" and "comparable" are on their own terms, I'm not seeing anything Valve should be doing differently here.