That is a lie.
Depends on the forum and what is being posted.
When I posted my negative review about CS:GO I got banned for advertising after two (2) hours.
Steam is policed enough to censor anything that falls outside its favor, while the most visited forums are consisted mostly of trolls, harassers, underage kids and mentally handicapped individuals.

Hold your horses.

While the backup mechanism works offline, the restore mechanism requires you to be online. So if you're offline for an extended period of time, they simply won't work, so don't bother. I have never found a way to restore them offline, and having left the service for a while, I'm not going to bother researching if it can be restored offline.

That was the reason why I suddenly found myself becoming a videogame pirate.
Didn't know almost anything about Steam until suddenly discovering that, besides installing game X, I also needed to install software Y and create an account and keep my net connection always on. It was an WTF moment and it happened in early 2010 if memory serves me right (still can't remember what game it was, though).

Fortunately I discovered GOG sometime later and I've since bought here the games I once pirated.

These games are so bad though, if anything it's another reason to dislike GOG.

Yes, I realise this. That's why it's not an obvious automatic thing to do, but just a thing to do to fulfill one of the hundred functions that gog backups naturally fulfill. But in that specific case (reinstalling a game after migration to a new computer), or for reinstalling a game to resume it a while after having uninstalled it, it's good enough.

It's not comparable at all with GOG's backups (which solve everything for any future usage in the same movement as installing the game in the first place), but it's at least a little something that would have helped me in yesterday's specific situation.

Personally I think Steam is slowly improving for the last 3 years, however I still the prefer the DRM-free model of GOG (especially since Denuvo ,by far the worst form of DRM, has been slowly creeping in the market).

Steam's greatest flaw is the community (however it's not exactly Steam's fault, bigger communities tend to become drama-filled cesspools), sometimes I can't believe what I'm seeing in the forums!

PS: What I do hate is when retail stores sell boxes with steam codes.

Steam's greatest flaw is that it's games are infested with a DRM client, and many/most of its games also have additional DRM infestations on top of that as well.

Your opinion is welcome, but I highly disagree with it.

Steam doesn't dictate what DRM each game uses (although one could say that Steam itself is DRM, but that's a different topic altogether), it's up to the developers/publishers who decide that. There are actually many devs that don't even include steamworks in their product's files (meaning you can simply copy-paste the game in an external drive).

The problem is that it isn't clear whether a title does have DRM or not before purchase, unless you resort to community made lists which can contain outdated info or none at all about the game you're looking at right now. Not to mentuon that devs can update a game with additional DRM in place.

This is great info if you already have titles in your "library", but not if you're going to buy new stuff.

I don't consider it that much worse than a box with just a DVD and online DRM.
A lot of (most?) console games still have a booklet in the box.

In the end I even stopped buying collector's editions because they replaced nice printed documentation/guides with toys.

How long ago was that then? Because these days flame war threads stay unmoderated almost indefinitely.

Become disillusioned? Why yes, yes I have. 6 years ago already.

It was three (3) months ago, and as far as I know it's the same up to this day.
Popular forums are flooded by flame wars, as you mentioned, but because of their frequent traffic they end up being moderated. For example Valve, Ubisoft and Activision games' related forums are "policed", and intervention is imminent if enough people report a post.
What I take issue with, is that even if there seems to be moderation, it is focused towards certain individuals and situations, thus you won't see flame wars be defused, rather posters be banned for posting unpopular opinions (thus get vengefully reported by dozens of users, and get banned to retain peace) and people who blatantly insult other users, disagree with moderators (yes, you are not allowed to disagree with them and posting about it is a bannable offense). Rules are shamelessly manipulated, in a regular basis, to provide a bannable reason, even if there is none, as long as there is a need/preference for your posted content to be removed.
I remember when I posted in a game's Steam forum about the GOG.com winter sale discounted price, ahead of the Steam sale. I just wanted to help people buy the game cheaper before Christmas. Within the hour, the company's community manager, moderating the forum, deleted my post with the deletion cause being "advertisement" (I guess he doesn't want to sell on GOG.com). After that I participated in discussions related to the game's design and mechanics, and the majority of my posts were deleted afterwards as being "advertisement", while there was none to be found by a sane man, clearly indicating I was a "persona non grata" on that forum, "owned" by that biggot.
The so called flame wars can keep going as long as no one is emotionally or intellectually hurt. It has been as such since the beginning. Steam forums are a cesspit and run by a mentally challenged mob mafia, consisted of both users and moderators.

Glad to see that when I'm not around threads like this are still posted on a constant basis. Next week's thread: "Starting to Dislike Steam, How About You???"

For me it was November 16th, 2004