There's a HUGE difference between a platform having optional DRM and a platform being DRM. Also it's not opt-out, it's opt-in, so by default games don't have it, if they do it's because someone on the game studio decided to add it, Valve does not force it or even encourage it, they just have it available.
It's very unfair to say "Steam is DRM", and a more accurate description is what I used "Steam has optional DRM".
Because if you consider Steam to be DRM by the same token you also consider itch and GoG and any way of buying games DRM, which makes the term almost meaningless since companies should be allowed to charge for their products.
Steam vs GoG is a turf war, Epic vs anything will make people side with anything. The problem is that Epic has a shitty store with shitty features, and the only way it can compete with the others out there is to pay piles of money to game devs so they make their game exclusive to their store for some time. So usually people just ignore the game until it comes up in another store, and most of us have completely forgotten about it by then so when we find out just add it to the wishlist and wait for a 90% discount in a while. The game has been out for years at that point so a massive discount is expected soon and you already waited years to play, you can wait a bit more and save money, plus that teaches companies that signing exclusivity contracts is a shit deal.
Every time... No, Steam is not DRM. I mean, technically it is, but if you consider Steam DRM you must also consider every other game store DRM.
Usually when we talk about Drams we're talking about things that try to prevent copyright infringement, steam does not do that. It does offers an API which games can implement which has a naive form of DRM, but games are not forced to use it, and a lot of games don't. More often than not you can simply copy the game folder from steam to another computer without steam and run the game there, therefore no DRM.
GPU go with AMD, I don't think I need to give much explanations here.
CPU you can do either, BUT AMD is usually better for multi-threaded applications (like video editing, modeling or animation), also an AM5 slot should last you years to come, AMD stayed with AM4 for a long time (I had most of the same PC for almost a decade thanks to that, it's still the same AM4, but I had to replace the MOBO since the old one broke). So I would also choose AMD here, although Intel is not bad either, and if you get it in a sale it might come out cheaper.
One important thing, ensure the drive is CMR, the reason is that you likely want a RAID, and non-CMR disks take so long to read the entire disk that the chances of a second failure while recovering from a disk failure is significant.
That being said, how are you keeping track of the disks state? I built my RAID recently, and your post made me realize that I have nothing to notify me if one of the disks shows early signs of problems.
My drives in the early 2000s were SCSI, the connector was a flat wide grey cable. I remember my first SATA disk as being a great improvement, still had jumpers though.
In any case, the game is not older than CD burners, like I said, I was buying burned CDs before that, and I lived in a small South American city, so they should be very accessible for North American/European folks.
Rule against hitting the groin or gouging someone's eyes. There are lots of combat styles that are more efficient than Jiu-Jitsu, but they're not for competing, they're for survival.
I used to train some of the less savoury martial arts, and ever so often we had people from the Jiu-Jitsu class wanting to train with us because they saw us doing "wrong things" and wanted to "teach us". What they discovered very quickly is that lots of Jiu-Jitsu positions put you in a very vulnerable spot if your opponent knows and can use pressure points, including groin and eyes, and that the "wrong" things we were doing might open a counter attack but prevented those things.
I'm not saying BJJ is bad, but it's not the br all end all that people claim it to be.
Just a small correction (that makes things worse):
It is sort of surreal to see someone so young they don't know what burning a CD is writing an article about a game older than CD burners.
The person asking the question here is correct, the phrase in the article makes no sense, and it's likely written by someone who heard the lingo "burn" in reference to discs but it's too young to have use it themselves (otherwise they would have said they ripped the intact CD, or they burned copies of it)
Edit: Also I think CD burners came out around the same time (I remember a store that sold copies in my city back in the 90s), although I personally didn't had a disk burner for many years (but also I didn't played Half-life for many years after it came out, so I guess it evens out)
At the end of the day data is just binary, i.e. it's composed of 0 and 1. What those 0 and 1 represent is mostly irrelevant to this discussion. The short version is that 01000001 can mean A or it can mean that a given pixel is 65/256 red, or that the speaker should vibrate in a specific frequency, etc, etc.
So what happens when you open a file that's not text in a text editor? Well, some of the 0 and 1 make up gibberish, or characters that are not meant to be printed. Fun fact, you should be able do this the other way around too, i.e. open a text as an image, but again it will be gibberish, and most likely would not load since images have lots of information that relate to size, compression, etc, that if incorrect the program won't know what to do, but because text can always be valid it will always work, although sometimes your editor might show weird thing in the places where there's a non-printable character.
Do you find it important that Spider-Man does not exist? Do you think anyone in their right mind would find it important? No, but the moment someone starts to force you to do or not do stuff because Spider-Man thinks it's bad it becomes important to make it clear that Spider-Man is not real.
The VAST majority of atheist are indifferent towards religion, unless that religion is trying to control them somehow. This is why you don't see atheist complaining about Buddhism in western countries, if a religion is not trying to force itself into an atheist life he cares as much as you do about all of the thousands of other religions you're an atheist towards. If you feel atheist are trying to impose their non-believe on you, it's because you're trying to impose your belief on them and they're calling you on your bullshit.
Also, btw, I never claimed I was an atheist, so I see no reason for you to think that atheist should believe the same thing I do.
Did you actually tried to launch the game? What error did you get? What game was it?
Steam launcher is not needed unless the game is programmed to fail if it doesn't detect steam, not all games do, it's usually a sign of a badly programmed game. Also the game might have had other DRMs.
But for example grab Crusader Kings or Stellatirs which tries to use the steam API bit if it fails it just keeps going without, and you can copy it to another computer and play without steam installed.