If you opened this up to free-only Steam games, that would probably get you a ton more players. Almost everything works on Linux now unless theres some kind of aggressive anticheat.
Check out MilkV, they have a 64 core RISCV workstation that supports PCIe at full speeds and has NVMe and SATA slots like a completely normal x86 motherboard.
People have gotten modern AAA games running on it.
I don't need a game to be hard, I need it to be consistent and well thought-out. Animal Well for example is a rather easy game, but because it only has one difficulty, the developer was able to keep a very tight focus on the world and puzzle design. Everything is layered there, because they don't have to be containerized and sliced into pieces to account for adjustable difficulty settings.
It goes deeper than just simple engineering though. It affects tone and overarching game design. It is multiple extra dimensions that have to be considered across every aspect of the entire game. If it is done poorly, you get paper dolls on easy mode and damage sponges on hard and nothing of merit to compensate for these facts. The difficulty of the game goes from being genuine to artificial.
I have an XFX RX 480 that i upgraded to an XFX 5700XT, that I then upgraded from recently to a sapphire 7900xtx. The XFX cards had crashing problems and issues where video would just cut out and go straight to black. This happened on both Windows and Linux, and on two different motherboards and power supplies. As soon as I switched to the sapphire, every single problem just... disappeared.
Having to include an "easy mode" in your game has powerful knock-on effects that change how normal and hard difficulties play too. Timings and quantities that would normally be finely tuned and hand-crafted suddenly need to be highly-variable and detract from the freedom of developing for just one difficulty.
Gnorp is a ton of fun. Ive been playing through guild wars to try to get gwamm but man is it a chore. Never did get through stalker, got walled in the section after the first loading screen with that area with the trucks and all the dudes with shotguns coming at you, but this was like over a decade ago that I tried. I mostly remember the flappy gums of one of the guys at the beginning saying "frau geobrau, pipe down m'yan, let me feel you een!'
The nintendo switch came out at the cusp of the switch to USB C, and before USB PD was fully hammered down, so it uses a weird custom/old version.
This is on Nintendo for not updating the standard on newer models, incorporating the old standard to make older peripherals work, and include rock-solid overvolt.
I think you might be missing the part where wayland WAS running perfectly for them. It still does for me. I am actively and happily using Wayland and everything for me works. XWayland is a fantastic stopgap for now.
Wine is (slowly) getting a native Wayland port, which will translate to Proton eventually.
I have had the opposite experience from you with wayland and btrfs. Recent data loss with btrfs but perfect functionality with Wayland (on KDE and Arch Linux). Moving panels just works. Fractional scaling just works (though i do miss the old method where smaller screens just got supersampled instead of the way they do it now).
If you opened this up to free-only Steam games, that would probably get you a ton more players. Almost everything works on Linux now unless theres some kind of aggressive anticheat.
You can see a list of free multiplayer games here