I didn’t agree with it being a paid product either. And I might have been misunderstanding so don’t take my word on this, but I think it was originally open source and free (at least in money, not sure about freedom) for those running Bazzite and primarily designed for Bazzite Linux and that they planned to keep supporting that version, so I feel like all that would do for the Steam Deck is incentivize people to install Bazzite Linux on it so that it would be free.
I’ve installed it on a Chimera machine also via Decky so I don’t think it’s distro specific.