Most foldable phones are from Asian companies, some of which are banned in the US.
The Western world is dominated by Apple and the market reflects that with popular Android phones taking cues from the iPhone. I don't think foldables will ever take off there unless Apple gets into it.
These are good points, but modern PvP games still support custom matches and going from there to self-hosted servers isn't really much of a leap.
In fact, I believe Valve's new game Deadlock does let you run your own dedicated servers.
Less games actually use Steam's DRM than people think. Even the ones that require Steam to run often just use their API for stuff like multiplayer functionality or displaying leaderboards.
There's an open source library that you can sub in to emulate the API and run the games on LAN without Steam. I believe there's no decryption involved so it should be 100% legal, just like how Proton reimplements Windows APIs.
Don't Starve Together scratches the MMO itch for me. It's not an MMO, but there are public servers where you can hop in and hang out, raid bosses and whatnot. I have ~4k hours in it now.
Valve does seem to contribute substantially to the development of their games, at least. Turtle Rock's Evolve and Back 4 Blood had nowhere near the success of L4D/2, which is still going strong 15 years later.
SO did go overboard at times; I've seen quite a few instances where posts were locked for being "duplicates" of completely unrelated problems. Oftentimes they were accompanied with unnecessarily rude messages as well.
But yes, the unwillingness of some (most?) people to use the search function baffles me. They'd prefer to write a narrative essay in SO for their FizzBuzz assignment and argue with mods rather than type a few keywords to instantly get the solution.