In a world where Valve controls 90% of what is running on a device with immutable / containerized images, yeah I think Arch makes a lot more sense. A distro focused on rolling release is a lot less likely to hang you up when you choose to update.
Debian is great, but depending on where you are in the release cycle it can be a pain in the ass to stay up to date and, frankly, the last time I ran it, shit like apt/dpkg configuration and so many /etc files and structures just felt like mis-features or too complex for their own good.
I don’t know the anime either, but the steam logo is walking away from the debian logo and then staring into the eyes of the arch logo. OP is saying that valve made the right choice by ditching debian (I thought they were using ubuntu, but that’s just a debian derivative with a bad UI on top) for arch as the basis for steamOS. For a gaming platform, I agree. You want the latest updates and software versions for gaming purposes (and proton/wine purposes), and they can hire employees to ensure they have tackled arch’s bleeding-edge instabilities before rolling the updates out to the general population.
Just out of curiosity, do you think that licensing your posts under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 makes it illegal to use them to train an AI? If so, why do you think that? I post GPL licensed code online, so I'm interested in this topic.
If you write code, you might be aware of the AI coding assistants out there. Most notable is probably Github's Copilot. Well, that AI assistant has an ongoing case against it to answer the question you're asking. So, just like you add a GPL (or other) license to your code, creative commons licenses are for text and media that aren't code and I add it to my comments.
Whether they will have an impact has yet to be determined, so we'll see if creative commons with a non-commercial clause is for naught or not.
The ironic part here is that NixOS and Steam don't really play that well together: Nothing is where pre-built binaries expect it to be on NixOS, including ld.so, so pre-built binaries simply won't run without patching. NixOS can do that for Steam... but as Steam is also downloading binaries, essentially being its own package manager, those binaries then run into the same issue.
OTOH you can just run the whole shebang in a chroot, exposing exactly what Steam expects (couple of libraries and the graphics drivers) which is what NixOS does and I never had any issues.
Another hurdle would be that NixOS is not end-user friendly. It just hasn't been a focus, Valve would need to write a graphical configuration/package management utility. NixOS also doesn't tend to go easy on disk space and network bandwidth which might be considerations, OTOH probably not an issue if they manage their own release channel. Things like flatpack also aren't an issue they get the same treatment Steam does.
How does Valve prevent you from controlling your own device? Their version of Linux isn't locked down, you can fully customize it like any Linux afaik.
Their system (and the Steam client) is proprietary, which means you can't easily see what the software does or change it. If you can't control the software then you don't control the device. People deserve to have the 4 essential freedoms. This is why Windows is bad and it's the same with SteamOS.
Steam (and other parts of SteamOS) is non free software, it can do anything on your system and there is no easy way for you to change that or even know what it does. Valve developers put themselves in a position of power over you. They keep secrets from you on your own device. This in itself is unethical, but they also abuse their users with DRM. How can you say that you have control in this case?