Recently, i had to move from nixos to windows against my will simpy because of anti cheats. While i dont game that much, the few games i enjoy playing are all online with some kind of anti cheat. I used to dual boot but i was tired of having to wait for my slow hdd to load windows (i only have one ssd). I literally used linux for everything else but because of anti cheats i am forced to move to windows. I managed to make it a little better by using wsl2 and removing bloatware but it will never be the same as linux
I don’t have a recent example because Proton always works (when it works).
Native builds on steam are by default picked over proton. You might be playing great native builds without realizing. Although since 2016 native build support has gone way down. Even before proton came out.
My experience with native Linux ports has been kinda bad actually. I usually don’t play AAA games so maybe that explains it. But Black Mesa or Psychonauts are better on proton. Could be true though, that those are just the ones I noticed. But If I can choose I usually go for the Proton version, seems to be more reliable. It’s a shame though.
My guess is that because those games target DirectX during development then they add a native build at the end that uses Opengl. What Proton does is take the DirectX version and route it to Vulkan. So it’s potentially just the Vulkan usage being better than actually Proton itself.