1 - I refuse to click anything from Polygon, these guys proved to be idiots often enough by now...

3 - Complaining about the sales is counter productive, sure you pay much less for the games - however I, along many many people, bought games on the cheap I would never have considered otherwise... the point is, the money get spent, and the big titles get their early adopters $$$ (look at their best selling list, there are plenty of full price games in there)

4 - Who are you to complain about low prices? you're an investor? how is this the gamer's problem? I mean, there is enough back catalog, freeware titles, etc. that if there is some bubble and people sell their games "too cheap" (which is the publisher's prerogative to do it or not, believe me, they would not do it if it made no sense) and a couple of studios are forced into closing, we get less new stuff for a couple of years/months, we still have plenty of the old stuff to play with! yay!

5 - The rest is more or less blowing smoke to try to get people to consider the other storefronts, now they may have some benefit here and there, however, Steam is also the only one I can use as an interface for an HTPC! and it has its own features and benefits that no one else has... what can we do, trade one evil overlord for another? get all our games on the windows 10 store? or the EA/Ubisoft variants?

That's not entirely true. They're not foregoing console royalties, physical PC games wouldn't have them either, so there's no saving there. Many games on Steam still do have publishers, so they are still paying the publisher fees regardless of being physical or digital. They still have store middlemen (that's effectively what Valve are). So the only thing they're really foregoing is packaging.

Oh, and if you think Steam digital prices are a rip off... just look at PSN/XBL UK prices, now those are a ripoff! Steam are at least in line with what you'd expect to pay for a physical copy, PSN/XBL are a fair chunk higher!

It's because they earned that.
Just like CD Project Red has earned allot of respect... And in essence was allowed to spend a little of that banked respect on the "Cyber Punk" trademark garbage.
If it was a company using the... I dunno... Scrolls name it would be a completely different kettle of fish. Shit would hit the fan.

Valve reinvigorated PC gaming.
They brought the cost of games down for PC gamers.
They made PC games more accessible.
They pushed a community-centric focus on games, allowing for things like mods and multiplayer to prosper.
And so much more.

They have also made some of the best games of all time and actively supported those games years after release.

Microsoft had abandoned PC gaming to focus on Xbox. EA and Ubisoft never gave a crap about PC gaming... The PC pretty much had Blizzard and Valve, so obviously PC gamers are going to rally behind those companies.
But once Microsoft, EA and Ubisoft realised there was 180+ million PC gamers and a 30+ billion dollar market... They have tried to claw themselves back into the market with mixed results.

They get their 30% cut even with Physical.

The difference with Steam and PC is that... A developer can cut out the massive chunk that a publisher demands, allowing developers to sell directly to consumers via Steam, that can bolster profit margins by a good 30-50% or more per sale.

Or you could be like Blizzard, EA etc' and not have your games on Steam at all and sell it via your own stores. Blizzard keeps 100% of a sale that way on PC, meaning it doesn't need high volumes to print money. (Although, they tend to sell a bucket load of games anyway.)

Physical games having royalties on consoles doesn't really matter though since that's not what Steam replaced. It replaced physical games on PC. I know there are some console devs now releasing games on PC too, but I expect the majority of Steam games would have been PC releases regardless of whether they were on Steam or whatever else.

Developers/publishers sure seem to think Steam's 30% take is justified though. If they didn't they'd go elsewhere or make their own online store where the take is lower. But Steam gives them what is probably the largest PC game storefront in the world to advertise and sell their games on and more often than not they think paying 30% of their sale is worth that.

Do you buy straight from the devs on the consoles you own, that is without buying directly from the store of the company that runs the console?, like the way Steam does.

I take it you also don't own many of the latest games that are only found on Steam or any of the other clients.