Well, that's kinda my unstated serious point in that joking comment: Steam, in a sense, is a package manager but a much better one in many ways so asking to abandon Steam for the system-provided package manager (which may not even exist if we're talking about pre-Store Windows) is quite flippant.

It shows a huge disregard for non-technical users. Very just-use-Wireguard (tail scale) or just-ftp-rsync-your-data (Dropbox).

No, but you can download apps via a package manager for all of that. Or use steam anyway?

I'm very confused why people these days are so happy letting one big company manage their entire library and history. Did we not learn from the 2010's?