The bigger picture is that not all monopolies are illegal, you cannot tell apple, nvidia, pepsi, Sony, or Nintendo to stop selling too much because too much people prefer their product... you seem to wanna make an exception for Valve for some reason.
I'm not making an exception; that's not what we are talking about. People have issues with EGS for some valid, but mostly invalid reasons, and I'm pointing these invalid reasons out. That's all there is to it.
To spell it out for you in case the subtleties got lost: Valve owns the PC market, not through some nefarious means, but they do so regardless. Getting competition in there by natural stimulus is borderline impossible.
A little thought experiment: EGS is now on the same level as Steam feature wise. Maybe a bit different, but similar value.
Would EGS then become adopted by the mainstream in the PC market? It's not very likely, because people have invested into the platform that is called Steam. They have their friends there, own a ton of games and so on. They aren't likely to divest even if EGS could compete on a feature level.
Why is competition needed in the PC market in the first place? Because for most game devs, the 30% cut, the possible publisher's cut and taxes leave very little money to the developers of the game, leaving less capability to make interesting and profitable games.
What does Steam offer to devs? A lot of things; but most things aren't employed by or useful to most games. In reality, most games are on Steam because it is
necessary and the 30% cut directly undermines the financial reality of many devs.
Developers do not go to Steam because they love the service so much. They do so because the market gets funneled through Steam. That's the singular reason.
And even then, most games are financial failures. I'm not blaming this on Valve, but it's a reality. You have to face reality in any business.
So since we have established that Valve's cut is too large for what it offers most devs and how competition would be a healthy and good thing for the industry (either by letting smaller and unknown games be more profitable, or by enforcing better services for developers), how do we establish competition?
I have already talked about the difficulty of breaking up this (emphasizing: not nefarious) monpoly even with a similar feature set.
What has to be done is to interrupt the status quo through any means necessary. If it means doing something you don't like because the only thing you can see is the "but mah Steam!" punchline, then I'm afraid to say you are the losing party in this field, because ultimately what's happening is a good thing.
Even if you get a little inconvenienced by having to use another launcher for 2 clicks if you want to play certain games.
Now, if this strategy pans out, I don't know. But I think it's the right direction for the industry either ways. I yearn for days where developing games becomes cheaper as that would enable tons more projects and a lot more creativity.
Tons of young game devs struggle to get their projects off the ground despite being talented due to lack of funding. Funding that could be smaller, if the cost was smaller.
We could be getting more success stories of new studios than we are getting now, studios that could become a new Blizzard or a new Epic Games for that matter, in 20 years.
This is all directly inhibited by the 30% cut in comparison to a smaller cut - and that is regardless of if you believe that Valve has a right to 30% or not.
