Though the poor argumentation began when you dismissed steve_v as a steam fanboy

after a casual review of all posts at:

https://dev1galaxy.org/search.php?actio … er_id=7554

...smells ...fishy ...ai/bot ...?

Steam uses wine to run windows games. The differences between "vanilla" wine and steam's "proton" fork are minimal, and usually confined to the latter being optimised and/or patched for gaming as opposed to general application compatibility.

    steam defaults to vulkan so if youre card cant do vulkan it will run the game with software vulkan

This has nothing whatsoever to do with steam. Proton (and most other "gaming" focused wine builds and frontends for that matter) defaults to enabling DXVK (and VKD3D for DX12) , because that is by far the best performing DirectX API translation layer available.
DXVK will use whatever vulkan renderer the host graphics drivers advertise, and on antique GPUs that could well be the lavapipe CPU implementation... Provided by mesa.

If your GPU doesn't support vulkan, you'd be better served by reading the documentation and setting the appropriate environment variables, rather than wasting perfectly good oxygen bitching about steam and "bloat"