Valve’s steam provides values to consumer but aren’t entirely “consumer friendly”. Some of their “give ins” are entirely because of competition.
Examples:
self refund and refund window, directly copy EA’s origin.
allow big publisher to negotiate store cut, direct response to Epic’s store cut.
linux push is entirely for steam’s own survival, not a pro-consumer move.
their policy changes on steam reviews over the years.
the Steam UI revamp multiple times and makes discovery pretty messy when they tried to gamify the discovery process. All for easier marketing campaign pushes. (I found it pretty annoying, but I also don’t like the Netflix style on EGS or other store front.)
Valve’s market place and their key/lootbox and cross game drops are among the pioneers just shy of the scummy gacha from the mobile space.
Valve’s policy dictates that you can not sell at lower price on different store front. Ie. a game dev selling on EGS can take off 18% and get the same amount of revenue from the store front, but they can’t price lower because of Valve’s policy. That’s not consumer friendly.
The fact that Valve can just charge 30% even if a developer didn’t use “any” steam feature is simply because they can. And we are all eating the cost cause developers have to factor that in as well.