They could have easily crammed the Steam Deck full of stuff to make it hard to use for piracy - locking down everything, making it usable only to play games you legitimately own, force you to go through who knows what hoops in order to play games on it. That’s what Nintendo or Apple or most other companies do.
But they didn’t, because they realized they didn’t have to. It’s 100% possible to put pirated games on the Steam Deck - in fact, it’s as easy as it could reasonably be. You copy it over, you wire it up to Steam, if it’s a non-Linux game you set it up with Proton or whatever else you want to use to run it, bam. You can now run it in Steam just as easily as a normal Steam game (usually.) If you want something similar to cloud saves you can even set up SyncThing for that.
But all of that is a lot of work, and after all that you still don’t have automatic updates, and some games won’t run this way for one reason or another even though they’ll run if you own them (usually, I assume, because of Steam Deck specific tweaks or install stuff that are only used when you’re running them on the Deck via the normal method.) Some of this you can work around but it’s even more hoops.
Whereas if you own a game it’s just push a button and play. They made legitimately owning a game more convenient than piracy, and they did it without relying on DRM or anything that restricts or annoys legitimate users at all - even if a game has a DRM-free GOG version, owning it on Steam will still make it easier to play on the Steam Deck.
In my personal life, I run Linux on all my devices and I would never invest in non-opensource technology for my career. (Work forces me to run macOS, but that’s another story).
For years now, I happily and only buy games on Steam, even if I have the choice between Steam and NoDRM. Simply because Steam just works™ and is convenient. (Of course one never buys games on steam with a forced additional starter from Ubisoft etc.).
Steam is really great from a technically POV, from a giving back to the community point and from a customer friendliness point (never had a problem with a return).
I even bought a SteamDeck although I am no big fan of handhelds, and for what it is, it is great.
I’ll happily waste more money on my Steam backlog of shame. ;-)
I really like steam but I don’t use it exclusively and I wouldn’t recommend doing so.
I shop around and I own many games on GOG in particular, which is DRM free and also convenient in its own way. They provide installers for games so your library is truly independent, and I have used Lutris and Minigalaxy to get those games running on Linux (with Proton) including on the Deck
Steam is great but it is basically DRM and not the be all and end all of gaming. Competition is good for everyone and I will generally try and buy from GOG if the price is the same or even if it’s slightly higher because I truly own my game data. That has a value in itself.
I’m a big fan of steam and gog. Steam does better “out of the box” on Linux but you can generally get anything running just as well on gog with minor faffing about. But one thing gog has that I love is the ability to play an older version of the game. New updates breaking something or otherwise not what you wanted, on steam you don’t have a choice usually but the newest version, on gog you can just select an older version and play that.