Valve is not forcing us to run steam. It can’t do that. What it can do is offer a very good product which makes us use it. If in the future, valve starts doing shitty things with steam, most of the community will just move on.

Also what the hell do you mean by consumer linux is steam¿?

What will they shove though¿? They don’t control linux like how Microsoft controls windows. The only OS they have control over is SteamOS.

This is not a Linux specific issue though it’s worse on Linux because vulkan shader processing happens for almost every game. I remember people on windows complaining that The Last of Us was compiling shaders for several hours when first launched and that if shader compilation was skipped the game was laggy as hell(which is not a surprise considering how poor the game ran even after shader compilation)

Dude what are your requirements as such. Do you want to tinker or do you want a system with as low maintenance as possible at the cost of configurability¿? Are most of your games on steam¿? Is there some software you absolutely need¿? Answers to these questions will help a lot in giving you recommendations

Do you get adaptive sync options in the display section of the settings (present beside the refresh rate selection option)¿?

If yes there are 3 settings - off, automatic and always. Setting it to automatic means that vrr will be used for full screen applications including XWayland applications(would have been stupid if it did not work with XWayland as almost all games run through XWayland). Off and always are self explanatory I guess