Proton is such a huge achievement.
The SteamDeck isn't for me (don't care for mobile form factor). But this work also benefits me on a Chromebook using its experimental Steam support. It runs Steam and games in a container that works well with Proton.
The company that’s really behind Proton [1] sells „CrossOver“ as a commercial product to run Windows applications on MacOS, Linux and ChromeOS with enhanced compatibility compared to free Wine. IIRC they started out to selling „CrossOver Office“ running MS Office seamlessly on a Linux desktop. If you want to support their effort you could buy a license for under $100 and run many Windows titles and games w/o emulation or the Steam client.
For those on macOS, there is an excellent new project called Whisky [0] built around CrossOver and Apple's Game Porting Toolkit.