oooh, thanks for the context! I've installed and run... maybe 50 games over the past 30-ish years, and every single one has run right out of the box. I'm on a Mac, so maybe that's the difference?
So the meta-conversation is: why was (is?) installing and running a game so difficult? Why did game-makers suck at that, creating a billion-dollar opportunity for Steam?
So unironically the answer to your first question is yes. After reading your other comments in this thread now I completely understand your perspective, and I hate Apple even more for it. Apple literally coddles their users to the point where they have created likely millions of users like yourself. You expect everything to conform to the Apple way, instead of you adapting to the ecosystem you are in. Apple specifically forces developers of their ecosystem to follow specific rules when it comes to installation, UX, dependencies, the whole 9 yards. It's why a lot of game developers simply avoid Mac entirely as a platform. Because it takes a tremendous amount of effort to conform to Apples silly requirements, for less than 1% user base on average (from a game developer perspective entirely).
But then you may ask, well if Apple has such a standard for everything, why not everything just conform to that and we make everything easier... It's not that simple see: https://xkcd.com/927/
It's not that installing and running a game is 'so difficult' it's that you're expecting it to be as simple as everything else you do in your Apple ecosystem. Because that's how Apple wants it. It's entirely a perspective issue forced upon you by the ecosystem you use.
The end result for all this is all the jokes we see about children expecting everything to be touch screen, or having no idea what to do with a controller when they see one. As humans we adapt to our environment, but if we're always forced into the same systems, we start to expect every system to work that way and we stop adapting.
So the meta-conversation is: why was (is?) installing and running a game so difficult? Why did game-makers suck at that, creating a billion-dollar opportunity for Steam?