Right. But again, that's on the individual for buying it for loads of cash upon release. The writing was on the wall for all these shitty AAA producing companies for years, yet the preorder FOMO train never stopped.
I agree about piracy/cracks for stuff that you already bought, but the publisher broke it in some way. But these are the exception, not the norm.
I'm a Linux user as well (arch btw) and I just look at protondb and https://areweanticheatyet.com/ as a reference. If something comes up as less than stellar, I'll just skip purchasing it.
Longest I had to tinker with were Project Zomboid (due to ancient gfx before I bought a new one) and Jedi Fallen Order (just to fine tune for performance/fidelity, took about 15 minutes).
I understand if you regularly go for games that require a lot of tinkering you might need more time though, but the Steam return is 2hrs of played time, not 2hrs of owning the game.