Perhaps I'm not as optimistic as some here. I think your point is well taken. Time will tell of course, but I bet it will be a race to the cultural bottom, and yet all the SJW and PC garbage will be strictly enforced and adhered to.
I'm a gamer from way back, starting with "Wing Commander" and progressing through Half-Life, FarCry, the Battlefield series, almost all of them, but I am skeptical.
Yeah, "free market" does not mean free-for-all. As individuals, corporations do have a responsibility to uphold community standards. If not, we do not have a civil society.
Just my two-cents.
And how do you propose that Steam uphold "community standards" when they are a global distributor? Why isn't the community ever responsible for upholding their own standards? Why must a random company make those calls, on vague terminology, based on guesses about how central Kentucky might differ from NE Arkansas and Kazakhstan, and then get punished when some money-hungry lawyer decides to parse a tiny difference and burn them for millions? Make a law, or shut up. Punting to a distributor, and holding them liable for your own community's failure to define their "standards" is ludicrous. You might as well hold gun distributors liable for Chicago gang violence.