Has it really been that long? Apparently so. Valve originally announced their rebranding of Steam Play with Proton back on August 21st, 2018. Seems like a good time for a quick reflection being halfway to a decade old now with the tech that gave rise to the Steam Deck.
It sounds dumb because no one’s saying that, you just made it up. That would be like if someone was directly crediting Gabe Newell with, idk, CS:GO battlepass sales or something. That’s not what anyone’s saying.
A better comparison would be crediting McDonalds as a company for their work in the handheld apple pie space. Did they outsource the work? Maybe. Did they come up with the recipe themselves? Probably not. But without McDonald’s involvement, we wouldn’t be able to enjoy hot, fresh, fruit-filled pastries with our Big Macs, and our fast food dessert choices are better for it. See? Much less dumb.
No it still sounds dumb, we know they were built by machines and were sold in packs. You lack basic understand in how certain things work. Game development also applies, Github is still the number one source for the information on Proton Contributors, GitHub data doesn’t lie, Valve employees do nothing.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/graphs/contributors