I think there’s one key thing you missed: you have never bought a copy of the game on Steam! It’s always been a license. Valve simply made the fact clear now because of legal changes.
so the next question, is this retroactive
So the answer for this is a solid no.
The “quit having fun” meme is ironically becoming as cringey as the thing it is originally complaining about.
You will help the community more by telling non-Linux people why Linux gaming is better, and this meme is doing the exact opposite of it – “oh Linux can’t play some games, yada yada. But we are still better! Switch over!” – like what’s the logic of it?
What’s the purpose of this meme other than circlejerking?
Disclamer: I am a Linux user myself, started with Debian and is now using Arch Linux.
I will share some advantages I experienced in Linux gaming:
Alt-tabbing old fullscreened games won’t mess with my monitor.
The compatibility of Wine when it comes to some older games is wild. SimCity 4 actually crashed less when I played it on Linux.
Better performance across the board. Granted it’s just a mere 5% difference but I will take it, why not.
Are the streamed data stored in a local cache? Surely the bandwidth costs are going up to the sky with the server sending data to every single player.