steam, epic, ubisoft, etc you run into issues when those services have downtime.

I don’t think lumping steam in with epic and ubi is valid. I can’t recall any significant downtime on steam in the years and years I’ve used it. Even if my internet is down, my locally installed games are still functional.

they include lots of bloat (if I want a program to download and run 1 specific game, I don’t want to download an entire store, library, forums, and social network along with it).

Steam is actually just a web browser. The store and forums and such are just web pages. You’re not downloading anything proprietary to steam. You can do the same in firefox or whatever.

I’m a little confused at your perception of things. I don’t see things that way at all.