In my experience the launcher hate is less about the MMOs that actually are doing something relevant like updating and more the ubisofts and 2ks that are putting in a second layer of drm that can break and usually exists to hoover more data than they could otherwise.

You can sell a game on multiple storefronts/launchers without forcing the steam version to first launch a different app

The US and Japan dev teams aren’t the only people working on it, there’s still the “core” team in China, though still doesn’t seem like a good move