I’ve done this so many times at school and work. It’s crazy what you can accomplish by leaving a problem until the morning.

spends an hour configuring Proton to run a game smoothly, plays for 10 minutes

I have a thought, coming from Raspberry Pis that use a microSD card as their main disk. People would report that heavy usage of an SD card would wear it out, particularly writes. Does Steam or the OS do any writing to the disks while playing from them? If so, unless you’re downloading new games, mounting in read-only mode might extend their lives a bit. Again, just a thought and maybe it’s not an issue since it’s primarily reads being done, or maybe it’s crossed your mind already.

Chrome and Windows? What in the closed source development environment?