I do buy games off other platforms and import them into Steam all the time.

I'll admit a 30% fee is egregious these days though, extortionate. I think it should be capped at 10%, then a further smaller cap planned every decade as technology improves.

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.

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.