You can get a USB 3 SD card reader and a fast SD card yourself. Even if it was bundled with the game, you're paying for the cost of the physical materials.
Nah, you can find people complaining about games being too big in cycles going all the way back to the beginning of retail PC gaming. I remember Screen Savers built their "Ultimate Gaming PC" in like 1998 with a few gigabytes of storage, and they said something like, "I know that seems like a lot, but games these days can be hundreds of megabytes, so we want to be able to just fit them all". Baldur's Gate 3 and Starfield are both large games. Not every game is that big, nor are these games necessarily doing something wrong by being that big.
SSD prices finally started dropping rapidly, and HDDs are even cheaper, for games like Sea of Stars or 30XX that don't need read speed performance, both of which have options to extend laptop storage space like the author's use case.
If you want SteamOS, your best bet is still Steam Deck. If you don't mind using Windows on a device that's not built for it (which does come with the benefit of compatibility and Game Pass), that's where most of these other options are going. I hear good things about the ROG Ally; seems like that's the go-to if Steam Deck doesn't get the job done for you. If you want some thorough reviews to help you out, check out The Phawx on YouTube. That guy has been doing thorough reviews of handheld gaming PCs for a long time now, and you'll be able to figure out which one is the one for you.
It used to be charging you to send packets through servers that they (in this case, Sony) own, but now that may or may not be the predominant use case in this era of games as a service where the developer needs to run the game through their own servers anyway. The reason Valve, Epic, and CD Projekt don't charge you for it is because you're paying for it every time you buy a game through their stores, which also used to be a less prominent situation on consoles, but now well more than half of games are bought digitally on consoles as well. So PC has taken more and more market share while consoles continue upping the price of their mandatory subscription fees for online play, and one day they'll sit there scratching their heads, wondering where all of their customers went.
having a cursor controlled by a joystick would make looting very slow
Perhaps, but aim down sights allowed for controllers to toggle two different sets of aiming speeds on demand, and Destiny-style cursors allowed for fast inventory management on character equipment screens that typically only worked on a mouse. There's probably a way to do it that's a little bit different than just mapping a mouse cursor to an analog stick that requires devs to be a bit more clever about it. The wildest one to me is that Baldur's Gate 3 looks entirely different when using a mouse and keyboard as opposed to using a controller. The likes of Elder Scrolls come up with one UI that can be controlled with either device, but even if I think that UI works great in both realms, people who've been playing those games for 20 years have a certain expectation for how it should look and work.
If it literally can't be done on a controller, then sure, but I've now seen people happy with the controls for Age of Empires II on an Xbox pad, so Arma can probably be done too. I've never played Tarkov, so I can't speak to it.
Me too, but some of my favorites were console exclusive. There's really no reason for those games to be PC or console exclusive these days. The financial math tends to not work out either.