> In general, I'm not sure what the idea of putting Dolphin on Steam was supposed to gain. First, I have a hard time conceiving why I'd even want to manage it from Steam,
In case you haven't heard of it, Valve sells the Steam Deck: a handheld gaming console with Steam as its primary UI. Under the hood, it's a low-power AMD x86 system running Linux (specifically, Valve's SteamOS distro). So having Dolphin on Steam would be the optimal way to make Dolphin available to Steam Deck users, just like having Dolphin available on the Google Play Store is the optimal way to make Dolphin available to Android users even though side-loading is an option.
In case you haven't heard of it, Valve sells the Steam Deck: a handheld gaming console with Steam as its primary UI. Under the hood, it's a low-power AMD x86 system running Linux (specifically, Valve's SteamOS distro). So having Dolphin on Steam would be the optimal way to make Dolphin available to Steam Deck users, just like having Dolphin available on the Google Play Store is the optimal way to make Dolphin available to Android users even though side-loading is an option.