If this were true, OP would see Steam as a user-mode process taking up the CPU time. Since the OP image is sorted by CPU time and the process isn’t visible, it’s gotta be those kernel threads that aren’t displayed by default.

private repo they commit to and build from

This isn’t possible with Ruby and Mastodon. The only way to distribute the patch is to reveal the changes to the source. FWIW, compiling the fix is still just an obfuscation method, one can still just diff the binaries and see what changed (see: reverse-engineering Windows vulnerabilities in updates).

At best, you can release it with a bunch of unrelated and obfuscating changes, but putting work into doing that is further delaying simply getting the fix released.

Fractional scaling (per-display), input isolation…

I interpreted that in the sense of “service call”, like going out to some remote site to do something menial

Nice, what’s your email stack look like?