You don't own any software! All software is licensed, yes, even FOSS software. The only software you own in a traditional sense is public domain which not only is a vanishingly small portion of software made, but is also a category that is difficult or impossible for software to be made a part of, depending on the laws in your country.

This is no different for Steam vs. anywhere else you can buy games, even with physical copies. The only benefit of physical copies is that it's much harder to remove access to those games after you purchase the license, unless there is online activation or DRM.

Edit: I should clarify the only other software you own is the software you create or paid to have created. Then you can license its use for others, or not, as you choose. So MS owns Windows, and I own some small number of applications I've created, and other companies or individuals own the software they produced. But none of that has any bearing on games on Steam or anywhere else where you're spending money to get access to a copy of a game.

I want to say I read it in an interview like 15-20 years ago

Steam delists games, however, if you already bought it, you still have access to it.

The cost of making the Steam Deck has gone up. Valve can't sell them at a massive loss or they'll go out of business. That's not Valve jacking up the price, like I already pointed out:

Go re-read my post, because you clearly missed an important part

the only reason their hardware is expensive now is because part manufacturers are mostly price gouging (lying about AI being the cause of ALL the increased costs, which isn't true, just like it wasn't entirely true with the bitcoin mining craze).

Building a PC for yourself has skyrocketed in price too, blaming Valve is just ridiculous and anyone making that argument is just showing everyone that they are wildly ignorant.

Also, scalping is shitty.

Being a scalper on the internet? It's more likely than you think

Yes, and Steam doesn't force it on a publisher. They can opt out.

Not by my definition. Not in the same way as denuvo or dvd movie drm is.

There are many, many DRM free games on Steam.

Stop spreading this nonsense. There are arguments against Steam, but until they require DRM to be on their platform, this isn't one of them.

They'd get sued to oblivion if they disabled DRM for all their games and you know it. This is just delusional.

You can do this right now with the Goldberg Emulator, but it doesn't work well for games which are deeply integrated with Steam's API (for example, to do things like Cloud Saves).