I might have ended up doing the same if I didn’t have to earn

I’m still on the starter ship so no combat yet.
I once managed to find a missile launcher that would fit into its specs, but for some reason, was unable to shoot it, so no idea if it was me not understanding the controls or that I missed some parameter (I had replaced the battery with supercapacitors to make space for the launcher), but again, no combat.
That was my first session. I played ~9hrs.

In my second session, I opened the main screen and instead of starting the game, I kept on staring at the compass icon for a while, imagining stuff. Then I quit the game and made this.
~12 hrs (I’m not regular at blender, so had to re-look for all UI stuff)

This exactly.

I don’t want an extra launcher/downloader thing that keeps on running in the background.

When I want to play the game, I want to only have to start the game itself. That on top of the fact that Linux can have significantly less bloat than Windows, is a big +.
I even experimented with turning off plasma and playing the game directly in X11 without even a WM. Though it turned out not to make a big difference since the DE seems to be light enough to not be a problem.

Even in case of Steam, the only times I want to have to run it is when I am opening the store or updating the games. Not when I just want to play it and definitely not for a Linux native game which does not require Proton nor the runtime.

So, if there are enough people like me, the client would be a wasted effort.