Great points!

Another issue is the difficulty of donating to projects.

Wine has done so much for Linux gaming, yet Proton is getting nearly all the credit and Valve already has its incentive. I’m not feeling bad for volunteers that shot themselves (and others) in the foot by providing ‘free software’ though but Valve’s ‘contributions’ are greatly exaggerated. A corporation is a corporation and their purpose is to make money.

I remember when steam was almost universally considered malware.