I can assure you trading is not your way out of this. There’s a whole industry of gurus targeting people to sell a dream of independence.
Save your money and develop skill(s) that result in a tangible product or service that people will pay for. Nothing wrong if you need to pick up a job in food service or retail to support yourself while you figure that out.
Then I’m misunderstanding this part. The PS3 compute cluster incident commented below is what came to mind.
But in the current climate I image that if the Steam machine was heavily subsidized that there would be a subset of people abusing that by doing something like purchasing, harvesting, and immediately reselling its parts.
Consoles make an attempt to be a locked ecosystem - which is why they can subsidize it - because they know if you buy it your buying their games for it.
World War 3 will keep it going!