I think where valve went wrong was not requiring specific minimum specs. It led to a very inconsistent and hard to support platform.
Steam deck leading to a standard “steam device” hardware platform with consistent OS and hardware is my dream, but I know their goal thus far has been to refine steamos and release it for OEMs to use on their devices.
Lowe’s uses a customized Linux distro for their department terminal computers. Most of what you do is in browser or terminal applications, if genesis is still in use.