That’s pretty unfair. Before Valve’s efforts, the first thing we PC gamers asked eachother about a new game was always “could you get it running?”
Three bad old days were quite bad, and they started getting better in lock step with Valve’s improvements to Steam.
Correlation/causation and all that. But for a lot of us Valve earned a lot of goodwill simply by allowing “request a refund” on games that run poorly. (Edit: which was apparently forced on Valve by a government. Valve got lucky there!)