Steam is always consistently fucking awful to use and used to crash explorer relatively consistently when I used it. Never had any problems with any other launcher, including the ubisoft one.

Weird. Steam is awful, but I've found that it's tied with Epic for "at least it actually works and is basically functional" as far as launcher/storefronts go. The Microsoft Store/Gamepass, Uplay, and Origin are all some level of "does not even function as a storefront on a basic level and/or is completely broken."