DRM only affects people who paid to play the game, the point of cracking a game is to remove the DRM.

Of course steam needs to call home when it’s online, but when you are offline you never need to connect again if you don’t want to.

Steam itself supports controllers. If you want to play a game without controller support you can use steam to play with a controller regardless.

Modding a game can be a complex ordeal, stream simplifies it (usually) and offers a download manager.

Steam reviews are far more trustworthy than ‘official’ reviews and that is just a fact. Reviewers are often bought, and even when they aren’t they directly paid for they are indirectly pressured to offer inflated scores, operate on a weird scale, and are often incompetent besides (the bad at games stereotype has existed since the 90s at least, and for good reason).