Steam Deck is intentionally a niche product, Valve is using it to get experience with this type of product and to improve their OS.Valve is a niche brand.
Most casual gamers have no clue who they are.
Steamdeck for example is a niche product but healthy, kinda like the Neo-Geo was except its specs are poor unlike NG at its time.
Also online wouldn't stay free if they adopted the console model.
We need someone else like Amazon maybe.
There is no console model of paid online, there is nothing that justified is when compared to something like Steam, it's just like that on consoles due to MS greed and lack of shame.
Amazon, Apple or Google would all fail miserably with a traditional console, they would all likely do worse than MS did, Valve is a much better suited competitor.