Although for some of us this is a well-known problem, it has appeared again with the release of DOOM: The Dark Ages so it's worth a quick PSA to remind people about Denuvo activation limits with Proton on Linux, SteamOS / Steam Deck.
You should keep following your principles, but that's not the reason it's working. The amount of gamers that even know about Denuvo is tiny, and those who care enough to not buy a game because of that is an even smaller fraction of that small number.
The reason is simply because Denuvo is expensive and a recurring cost. Once a developer removes it, they no longer need to pay for it.
I don't think that's true about denuvo specifically. I've known some pretty big "normies" for lack of a better term that knoe denuvo makes games run worse.
Basically the only games I want to play that have Denuvo currently are a handful of games published by ATLUS like Persona 5 the Royal and Metaphor: Refantazio.
I actually bought Metaphor, not realizing it had Denuvo, and then was just randomly unable to launch the game. After fiddling with some proton settings and reopening the game I got a very generic error message with a link to a website that told me I was locked out of the game for 24 hours.
As far as I can tell, Doom the Dark Ages has it, and many reviews are quite good. I don't know if they're good enough to convince me to install it though. Maybe I'll wait until they remove it months or years later.
Yeah i'm not a doom player myself but i was surprised about it having so many problems as well, cause generally speaking i always heard people praise their pc ports for being extremely well optimized.
Denuvo, hearing that the music isn't as good, the performance issues, and crashes have all but killed my hype for the game. I might still cave in and buy it, but I probably should just support a better company instead.