I get your point, but here's the thing, GoG has never given a cent to Lutris, Wine or Heroic, I know about those and the many others that came before such as PlayOnLinux. But those are not useful thanks to GoG, they're useful despite it. If I have to use an open source tool to "emulate" a game, and another one to organize and manage my library, I'll give those guys money and pirate the games and get the same experience a lot cheaper. Because, like Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service problem.

you can always play without updating if you want to

Can you? I never saw a straightforward way to do this.

I seem to remember a pop-up asking you whether you want to play without updating. Also I remember being able to stop a specific game from being updated by selecting the version to use in the settings, of course not all games use this, but the ones that accept mods usually do. I remember I had my CK2 pinned for a while because of mods.

I don't think they do anything unethical but I don't like having this private company's always online closed source software running in the background on my computer.

I get that, but I only open Steam when I'm going to play something, so it's not always online running in the background, and the vast majority of games I play are closed source so that's a moot point