The steam main Window is now also the launch window, thus you cannot browse steam while launching a game.
Launching a game means that the entire Steam Window fades and it will become entirely unusable until the game starts. That is not a separate startup window, thats just an embedded element inside the main one. If you accidentally click outside, the game startup gets canceled.
It is a bit more than mildly frustrating when Im waiting on the Vulkan shaders for BFV for like half an hour to process.
"Upgrade your pc, lol" should not be a solution to a problem that a company randomly created for no real reason. What OP is doing is right, bitch about it and hopefully Valve will notice and fix it, as they should.
You don't know what you are talking about. In OP's case the game is not loading effectively, but it is compiling Vulkan shaders, as it's running under Linux. That process is normal to take a while.
M2 drives as in an SSD connected to an M.2 slot? That's the way to connect SSD drives internally, so "get an SSD" basically means "connect an SSD drive to your M.2 slot". There's nothing like "M2 drives are even faster than SSDs".
an "SSD" can be either a SATA-cable connected 2.5" SSD, a M.2 SATA (protocol) SSD, or an M.2 PCIe SSD. their respective maximum R/W speed increases significantly in this order, so M.2 is not the only way to connect an SSD, at least not as long as cable-sata SSDs still exist.