This is not true, I still apreciate Steam for theyir work on Linux stuff so I am not hating on them, but facts are fact.
1 You need to start Steam to play most games
2 The Steam client dropped support for older oeprating systems
In my case I had an old laptop with a few games, Steam updated itself to a version that was not compatible with the OS so my son could not use the laptop, I was using this old laptop only when traveling so the issue was sudden to me, I had no time to fix this crap.
The fair thing to do is for Vale to create just a SteamLauncher that allows you top run your games, no Store/News/Social/Workshop, it could run in offline mode.
Maybe this was a stupid bug that the client fck itself, but it sucks to turn off your laptop working fine, turn it on in a few months and now you need to do research and debugging and fixing.