I can understand that Valve doesn’t want to give false impressions that a game runs perfectly when there are imperfections as mentioned

Idk, I disagree with this. It means that games are being labeled as “not verified” because of things that don’t really hamper what people would care about - the keyboard popping up for naming your character or seeing “A” in a green circle isn’t going to make people be like “oh no, this doesn’t work well on my steamdeck, I’m not playing it”. Does it look unprofessional? Sure. But that’s not what people care about when looking at the ratings for compatibility. They just want to know if it’s going to run well.

These systems are all about trust and evaluating the right metrics. Having the right button icons matters to Valve but not the player. Once players play games that aren’t verified and they run fine, and they play games that are verified but still have performance hitches in some places, etc, the rating system loses its credibility and then it’s meaningless.

On top of this, developers are already shunning the verification and just not bothering. Some of the things they ask for don’t directly affect the playability of their game. It’s an extra hoop for the developer to jump through, and if people don’t trust the badge, there’s no point in chasing it. Valve is literally undermining their own system from both sides by doing this.

There’s already people in this thread touting protonDB being a better evaluation. It’s exactly this that will happen and will continue to happen and continue undermining their rating system until Valve aligns their verification system with what users actually care about.