While I hate always connected DRM, and lamented the death of physical media when steam got huge (and also refused to get a steam account for years for that reason), we would have multiple shitty stores if steam didn't exist, I think.
Look at epic and all the other distributors. Their stores are terrible and that's with the inherent competition of going against steam. Imagine if they were the only game in town. . .
Also looking at history. Download stores run by game stores. Or some startup. Some random extra DRM involved. Shut down in a few years without recourse... Just imagine that repeating every few years. Maybe fine for Linux and Mac users who expect no longevity from their purchases. But as PC user, no not acceptable.
You can also think of generators as a native implementation of Observables from rx (except you can't replay a generator), especially async generators.
You can implement basic operators like map, filter, take, etc. over generators to create pipelines of operations. Very neat abstraction to work with, but like rx, can quickly get hard to reason about.
Recently I wrote some tooling to read, do some operations, and write hundreds of thousands of files locally. Using generators solved having to think about not loading too much stuff into memory since it only yields files when consumed. Also allows you simply implement stuff like batching, like running X requests to a server at a time, and only starting the next batch once the first one is done.
Observables and Generators (iterators) are fundamentally different. Observables are push-based (like a promise) whereas iterators are pull-based (like a function).
Glossing over this fact leads to a flawed understanding, not a deeper one.
Would the PC video game market be bigger or smaller without steam?