That's a really bitter way of saying that Steam's been chugging along doing fine for some time now. Epic's store was never really a competitor until Sweeney starting getting itinerant over his royalties red herring, paying developers for exclusive launches, and giving away at least a game a week for something like a year now. It's still missing a ton of features compared to Steam (though one could argue how many of those features should stay missing), and it is slow as molasses.

Steam's only other potential competitor was GOG, and it seems those two have had a fairly friendly relationship over the years. Remember that Valve gives away Steam keys to developers and resellers at very little cost, and that there are thriving third-party markets because of that.

You could argue that they have been stagnant in terms of game development, but everyone knows that isn't exactly true since Alyx was released. I don't really know what state VR was in before its release but from this outsider's perspective it seems to have raised the bar considerably.

Save for GOG, the DRM war is effectively lost, and so I'd rather be living under Gaben's benevolent dictatorship than some of the other more corporate-minded masters.