

Yuck indeed.
People tried many ways to get around it, back when I was still using an US variant Samsung Note 9, people went as far as using a leaked engineering/preproduction ROM, which can be flashed using Samsung’s official tool because it does have the correct key for the locked bootloader to accept, being built and compiled by Samsung, and because it’s an engineering ROM it would give you root and everything despite of the bootloader still being locked.
But it was an exceptionally rare leak, and it was only meant for preproduction for a reason, it is very VERY unstable and not exactly usable for a daily driver lol
So happy I am leaving all that BS from Samsung behind with my current Sony Xperia 1 VI which is bootloader-unlocked and rooted and deeply modded and truly my own device lol
I’m not sure Valve have folded as much as pretending to comply for now to stall for time to work on a more strategic countermeasure that will stay long into the future.
Maybe I’m just coping but it’s the logical thing to do in the US where Valve is based, and Valve is one of the few US companies who are not always under time pressure because they are like one of the biggest companies who’s private and not publicly traded.