Of all the "app store" type programs that I have to interact with, Steam is somehow the least painful one.
And I deal with a bunch of them; Gnome Software, Microsoft Store, Epic Games Store, Google Play Store, (Samsung) Galaxy Store, F-droid, not counting some dedicated pseudo-stores aberrations like JetBrains Toolbox and Wargaming.net Game Center... Those are all much smaller (ok, Google Play Store is probably the largest), almost featureless in comparison, yet they are slow as molasses and buggy as hell.
Maybe its just my bad system (integrated graphics, 4 GB ram, i3 8th gen processor) but Steam actually performs far worse than MS store, Gnome Store, and the Google Play Store (though thats on my phone and not my laptop).
And I deal with a bunch of them; Gnome Software, Microsoft Store, Epic Games Store, Google Play Store, (Samsung) Galaxy Store, F-droid, not counting some dedicated pseudo-stores aberrations like JetBrains Toolbox and Wargaming.net Game Center... Those are all much smaller (ok, Google Play Store is probably the largest), almost featureless in comparison, yet they are slow as molasses and buggy as hell.