That's why I said "one of the fairest" and not "the fairest one". There's a whole lot of what steam does and other companies won't ever do, for instance, Proton. I am forever thankful for it especially, since it motivated me to give linux the second chance. Not to say, that this particular technology turned the whole OS table around.
Steam is not perfect by any means, but people behind it offering quite a fair deal both for the devs and especially for customers. There's basically no alternatives, bc steam has so much more to it than just storing your game library and being a game vendor.
On a page of every game that is sold on Steam, you will see text that says "Buy". But I'm pretty sure their ToS says that you are only renting games from them. So they are misleading their users.
Not actually owning games sucks, but find me a digital marketplace that doesn't say that you're only "renting" them or some other bullshit. Steam doesn't call it renting, rather, I quote, "As a Subscriber you may obtain access to certain services, software and content available to Subscribers or purchase certain Hardware", where the subscriber is the word to call any user that has a steam account, nothing less nothing more: "You become a subscriber of Steam ("Subscriber") by completing the registration of a Steam user account." https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/#1
Basically, this wording is a backdoor for them, in case their servers will be shut down and they won't be physically able to provide any game files. Yes, it opens some ways to exploit this, but unlike some other companies like Ubisoft, Valve never seem to use it this way. Also, torrents do exist, and guess what, they're DRM free, just as you like it, I assume. That's actually exactly why they should exist, imo: to preserve things.