I think you're discounting just how much they've invested and continue to invest in Proton/WINE
I'm not really sure I am... Do we have some actual numbers into how much money they've sunk in linux?
Gaming on linux is a huge community effort, whether it's wine, dxvk, vkd3d, mesa, linux itself... and plenty of smaller projects like lutris, bottles, UMU... And all this spans literal decades, far before valve ever got involved.
Beginners using vanilla GNOME
Beginners will never really be in a position where they'll be using vanilla gnome, so that argument is kinda moot. And even if they did, those features are literally one extension away...
will quickly miss features like a minimize button and certainly tray icons.
Tray icons don't exist in gnome's ecosystem, it only becomes problematic once you get third party applications. The real problems are the minimize/maximize, desktop icons, and panel on top when coming from windows. Although these days with the ever increasing phone use people might just be more at ease with gnome's workflow anyways.
It annoys me too that Valve is getting most of the credit for Proton while most of the work is actually done in winehq, dxvk... I'm sure Valve pays for some development here and there, and greases some developer wheels, but the main thing they do is being a front end for consumers.
My point being that while valve itself has only 350 employees, it subcontracts far more than that.
These stats don't include subcontractors and as such they're very misleading. For example, who do you think produces the GPUs inside the steam deck? Hint: it's not Valve.
And now I realize it must have been dreadful, at first.
That's basically sleep paralysis.
This isn't massive flaws that suddenly appeared overnight, or the straw that broke the camel's back, it's purely because they want to get back at the developer. So yes, I think "review bombing" is accurate.
Don't get me wrong, i dislike enshittification as much as the next guy; but I don't think a game's review should be about what the devs posted on twitter yesterday.
This would only serve to advertise their ips, just look at Overwatch. If you really want to fuck with a corporation, the best way is to forget about them.
Yeah each distribution has their own patch set. If you really want to compare you need to start with the most popular, ubuntu and fedora.
The two examples you gave are definitely not most users. I'd be surprised if it were even 20%. And the tray icon isn't necessary for either of them to work correctly. Most people use the computer to open the browser.