Probably because they're essentially a monopoly and if a dev wants to release to a sizable audience on PC they have to give Valve 30%.
I pray for the day people stop acting like Valve are your friends. Pretty much every ****** business practise was either invented or popularised by them. Online activation for physcial games, forced install of launchers, lootboxes, battle passes, turning a blind eye to gambling sites using their products to let kids gamble, not owning your games, not refunding digital purchases until they were forced to by lawsuits like this, pushing paid mods in the worst way possible. Their sales aren't even remotely good value compared to key sites these days either.
They're not at all. You have things like Epic store which is growing in popularity, you have things like GoG to provide permeant download solutions for many games. You have Origin, and there's like a crazy number of developer owned launcher platforms, Ubisoft has one, etc. And just like valve none of these people are your friends, I don't know why that's levied at Valve specifically.
Sony and Nintendo and Microsoft are all locked propietary platforms which are even worse, no one complains about them.
The truth is that if you don't like the royalty fees of a service you can just pass the cost to the consumers. This is why PC games have always and will always be cheaper than console counterparts. Because the console devs have to pay royalties for every game sold to their customers, it's how they make their money (not on hardware sales, that's usually a loss, or at best break even) Guess what, the devs just pass that cost to the consumer, it doesn't come out of their bottom line, it's just part of the cost of doing business.
Pretty much no one complains about the prices on steam, we get practically speaking infinte re-downloads of our media (something not everyone does, remember Origin and their limits) there's a certain high level of reliability with the steam platform, library sharing with friends and family, a number of other integrated things which improve the experiences, anti cheat, server browsers and networks, social parts like disccusions, a forced continuity of accounts so that there's reputation attached to players (people can be VAC banned across multiple games for example) there's a massive benefit to gamers other than just buying games.
Tim Sweeny is moaning about this on X, thing is, it wont make any other platforms look more attractive. The end users dont care for the most part
Almost all of what you mentioned either existed long before steam (online activation for example), physical media was always going to die, they just got there first. If other sites have better sales, just go and use them? No one is forcing you to use steam.
