What they said, exactly:
If that happens on Steam, I can reasonably expect a refund if it was previously Verified, and because of the verification system, they also have an incentive not to break compatibility.
Emphasis mine.
They didn’t say it won’t happen. They said they have far more confidence that it’ll be much less likely to happen. And that they have a reasonable expectation of refund if the developer pulls that.
There are no guarantees here, but Valve has put a lot of time and effort into making Linux games work, and Epic has not. No, they can’t stop developers from pulling those stunts, but they’re no more happy about it than we are and, from everything I’ve been seeing, are actively working on getting developers to stop doing that.
Also, the anticheat excuse is mostly a lie, the ones Destiny 2, Rust, and Apex Legends use are compatible with Linux, and just require, as I understand it, checking a box and including a file in a specific spot, so those are just outright anti Linux for the sake of hating Linux and Linux gamers.
Honestly? Yeah.
They’re perfectly functional still and capable of pretty much anything for a modern workload, spec depending… If they can run win 11 fine (and they should be able to if they can run 10), then the cutoff is arbitrary and will cause more systems to find their way to landfills sooner than they otherwise would have.