People value convenience differently.
A huge number of people would rather pay a few hundred bucks more to have a plug and play appliance with a warranty from a reputable company show up on their doorstep. They don’t have to learn anything about hardware, or how to install Linux. It just works.
Some people are happy to save the money and take the risk on used hardware.
The Steam Machine is for the former, Steam the platform is for the former and the latter.
convenience and being an early bird is an odd combination, also there's plenty of builds although less power efficient on amazon and then there's the playstation 5.
Again, convenience is something that people value. Most people do not understand gaming PC builds. Even many gamers. They don’t want to. They want to play games, not build computers. A lot of people don’t want to get something from Amazon from some fly by night company that is going to need a few hours to configure, and might not run games they thought it would.
Convenience and being an early adopter are hardly at odds with each other. If anything, these people are early adopters because they want the convenience of not dealing with pc builds. People that already have gaming PCs and love that hobby aren’t going to line up to buy something that they enjoy making, or that they know enough about to feel comfortable buying used from Craigslist.
People are paying for a sure thing. Used PCs and no name Amazon machines are not a sure thing.
You and I might see it differently as people fluent with computers. Reseating a ram stick that got jostled in shipping isnt scary to most people on this site. It is terrifying to most of the world though. Steam is going after people that want to use PC games, but not play hardware tech.