Debian has all the updated packages one needs for gaming just as well as the other distros.

Yes and no, but I agree with the overall sentiment. Debian is entirely fine for gaming.

People in this thread have very interesting ideas of what “shit hardware” is

My two suggestions are forcing a different proton version (you mention this, so im guessing you already have) and ensuring you have a 32bit opengl driver installed(package names will differ between distributions. Arch wiki has some info)

For troubleshooting, launch steam from a terminal and watch for errors on game launch/close