If that happens to you, that’s both a great reminder that mindlessly copy-pasting commands from the internet is a terrible idea, and a chance to practice your restore-from-backup routine! I see no downsides.

Why use a fancy GUI tool when good old dd does the trick

Why openvpn? Last I checked wireguard has significantly better performance (plus it’s built into the kernel already)

Same, I know installing from other launchers on linux is possible using lutris, but since the steam experience is so smooth, I’ve never bothered to figure out how.

What do you mean? Explicitly having to set if= and of= is way harder to screw up than mixing up the order of arguments for e.g. cp.