seems more blatantly desperate than anything—Overwatch 2 has been a bit of a disaster.

about a decade ago, when Blizzard was in court with Valve over the latter taking the reigns of "DotA", this would've been unthinkable.

It’s probably more a way of enticing steam deck users to play their content.

Does OW2 even run on the SteamDeck? Checking ProtonDB says it's unknown compatibility, but generally competitive PvP games struggle due to their highly intrusive DRM/anti-cheat that wants root kit level access.

Back when I use to run Linux as my main system OW was one of the games that ran basically without any problems (other than shader compilation at the start) sometimes even better than it did on Windows.

Funnily enough there have been a few times that Wine specific problems have been addressed by the BNet team (pre steamdeck) and when Linux players were accidentally banned they have unbanned them iirc in some scenarios.

yes.

No as it has nothing to do with their objections.