I don’t think that was the real issue though. People didn’t want it because a ton of games didn’t work, manufacturers weren’t excited because there wasn’t an existing market, and Valve wasn’t really invested. They basically tried to pawn most of the risk off onto hardware manufacturers.

The Steam Deck took the opposite direction, they invested themselves in pushing hardware, which meant they had more incentive to get games to be compatible, and the result is creating a market that other manufacturers could actually quantify. They took pretty much all of the risk themselves, and later manufacturers decided to jump on board.