Proton developers are working on Wine code. Their patches go upstream. If you are using Wine, you have benefited (massively) from the sea change that has occurred (directly and indirectly) as a result of the development of Proton.

I remember the naysayers predicting that Gabe would never in a million years make the required investment because the state of Linux gaming was (in their assessment) that terrible.

And now we’re having argue about whether it actually did anything for us? In the comments about an article about how much it did for us?

That’s not an argument I’m having, I watched it happen.