Steam is popular because it won a brutal evolutionary battle in the realm of PC distribution. PC games have never had any barriers to distribution, and old distribution methods (physical media, direct downloads etc.) still work just as well today as they did decades ago.
Developers use Steam not because they are forced or bribed to do so, they use it because it is better -- it's just easier to make money by distributing via Steam (it could be any combination of things like the wider audience reach, easy DRM integration, built-in CDN and auto-update, built-in cloud saves, etc. etc.). In a sense, Steam's victory is like that of Wikipedia, GMail, or Youtube etc. It provided something that was for a long time magnitudes better than the competition.
Looking at it this way, I think the article does miss one final way one might "beat" Steam -- a fundamental paradigm shift in how someone consumes games as entertainment. Steam's success depends on the idea that people want to do "PC gaming". That the idea of collecting, downloading, installing, and running games that they choose themselves on general purpose machines they own themselves is attractive to enough people.
I personally believe and hope this idea will stay with us, but I am also from an older era of tech. What beats Steam will not be a better Steam. It will be something else, something that maybe seems obvious in hindsight but impossible to imagine today. Just as a fish does not question the water it lives in, and we the atmosphere we breathe, to truly compete with Steam, one must be something so obvious that consumers would wonder why anyone would ever choose anything else.