The whole OK symbol thing was literally a false flag by 4chan to clown on the news media's fervor at the time to label things as racist dog whistles, specifically the whole Pepe shit that was going on.
The fucking thread that started it was (paraphrasing): "Hey guys, do you think the news media would be stupid enough to believe the OK hand sign is a white power dog whistle? [Image of WP poorly traced over the OK hand symbol]"
Obviously, if you get your kicks out of pretending to be a fool, you shouldn't be surprised when you find yourself in the presence of actual fools. That also very much applies to the type of edgelords on 4chan that thought it would be funny to "pretend to be" racists, or at least to have discovered a racist hate symbol. Eventually enough people will take it seriously that the original "joke" (if you can even call it that) will be lost.
In the comment I initially responded to, you made a specific point of calling out
As if it was only shit in those cases. There's no need to call that out specifically if you're trying to make the point that they're all shit on Steam (which we're in agreement on).
Usually a statement like that implies the inverse, in this case that you don't write off the discussion forums for games that don't fit that criteria. Hence my confusion and my call out that the Steam discussion forums have always been shit.
I agree that it's for the reason you called out here, that Steam just relies on the devs to moderate their own discussion forums. At the very least, they should default to not creating them unless the dev specifically opts in.