

What does it mean to “process shaders in real-time”?
Processing them as they’re loaded, quickly enough that there’s no noticeable frame drop. Usual LLVM based shader compilers aren’t fast enough for that but ACO is specifically written to compile shaders for AMD GPUs and makes this feasible.
Pre-compilation would in theory always yield higher 1% lows yes, but it’s not really worth the time hit anymore especially for games that constantly require a new cache to be built or have really long compilation times.
I think the one additional thing Steam does in that step is transcoding videos so they can be played back with Proton’s codec set but using something like Proton-GE, Proton-cachyos or Proton-EM solves this too.
Disclaimer: I don’t know how the deeply technical stuff of this works so this might not be exact.
Besides other pages alternatives you could try a cheap vps. They start as low as $10/year and any will be plenty for a static site. It’s also fun to play around with hosting other stuff. lowendbox.com has some good listings.