Gamers Nexus did a very in depth review of the Steam Machine [1], which includes a comparison to a build yourself similar machine.
The result is that for about 70 dollars less you can put together a somewhat more powerful PC than the Steam Machine, but not for that form factor, it would still be bigger.
IMO, the Steam Machine is not a bad purchase if you are in the market for that type of product.
Instead of making it work with Discord, built it around xmpp with as many of the same niceties that discord offers and get yourself a working alternative on an open, powerful protocol, fully FOSS.
People want to get away from closed, centralised applications. The sentiment is the strongest it's ever been. But they don't have compelling and working enough alternatives to do so.
I mean, ignoring the fact that it's one example versus a list of examples I posted, I still don't think Debian website is that bad. I remember how it used to be, when it had a link to get the CDs with the distro and the option of getting all the packages in the package manager repository. Debian evolved like everybody else.
To me, and of course this is personal, Debian website looks pretty professional in an enterprise-y kind of way. I quite like it.
But then again, it's one example. Hell, even OpenSUSE's website looks super slick and modern.
That has not been the case for quite a long time now. Lots of distros still have websites that look like a wiki, see Arch. But in their case the Arch wiki is one of the best wikis ever existed for what it covers.
If you look at modern yet established distros, I struggle to find the outliers that don't have professional looking, slick web pages. See all the *buntus, Fedora, Elementary OS, Cachy OS, Bazzite, Endeavour, Manjaro, Linux Mint, and so forth.
The result is that for about 70 dollars less you can put together a somewhat more powerful PC than the Steam Machine, but not for that form factor, it would still be bigger.
IMO, the Steam Machine is not a bad purchase if you are in the market for that type of product.
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=66QzlDewigE