One final suggestion is to simply look to see if Debian already has a piece of software when people suggest using a PPA. Some developers don't like Debian (for instance because Debian disables tracking code by default) and recommend PPAs when you don't actually need them.
P.S. 'PPA' is a Ubuntu term, while Debian tends refer to 'third-party repositories' instead. Luckily, they are exactly the same thing!
https://wiki.debian.org/Steam#Installing_Steam
I think I'm convinced, I'll try Debain and if it doesn't work I can always go back to Mint.
At the end of the day, stuff in PPAs is just .deb packages, so it may be possible to just install them in Debian. That said, I've never had to use a PPA in my life, the default Debian archive already has basically everything.