Valve hasn’t released anything of note since this has been published. So I guess we should take these as anti patterns. Valve is more of a hat generation company than a game company so it seems like no one should take any game related advice from them.
Steam Deck and Proton are pretty major, IMO. Even if you exclude the Deck itself for being hardware, SteamOS and all the associated UI/UX is pretty nice.
I don't disagree with this at all. But Valve will forever be the company that cannot finish Half Life 3. They are the company who spends WAY more time and engineering effort on selling more fucking hats in TF2 than releasing actual quality games.