Steam is pushing DRM, to publishers and makers, just the soft sales push rather than forcing them to use it.

It's not even heavy DRM - it's designed as a single DLL and there are literally freely available implementations out there of the API as DLLs which allow running most Steam games offline and Steam has done nothing to try and have them pulled down - so at the moment it's not at all done in a nasty forceful way.

(And, as we've seen from how they caved to payment processors on the whole Adult Games front, Steam can be even be pushed to do things they don't intend to do)

The end result is still that most Steam games do have Steam DRM, most gamers out there don't know how to work around it, and if tomorrow Steam wants to force update all games to have nasty DRM, they can.

It's kinda like it's possible to configure Windows 11 to not run with all the eavesdropping shit, but people have to be aware of it, care about in and go out of their way to make it happen (though, unlike Steam, MS will actually periodically switch back on that stuff which people switched off).

It's not a nasty "authoritarian" forcing of DRM but it's still the relentless soft sales push that in practice results in almost everybody by default buying and running games with DRM, whilst with GOG the default is no DRM.

If there is one thing almost 4 decades as a gamer have taught me is that often DRM is fine until it isn't, and you don't really know which ones will be a problem until they are a problem and by then it's too late and a game you love is now unplayable.

In risk management terms, with games purchased from Steam de facto there are risks which are not in games purchased where offline installers are available and which are explicitly without DRM, and a couple of decades in this have taught me that sometimes you get bitten by such risks.