I've built a couple multiplayer browser games and getting the server component to a state where it's end-user distributable probably involves another 50% of the work that I put into building it in the first place since I'm just rsyncing code onto a VPS.

It's like thinking that just because the code exists, then it's in a state that could be pushed publicly to github, and that's not the case for almost any codebase.

To think that I would need to do all that the second I charge $1 seems unreasonable. And I think you underestimate how true this is for most games you see on Steam.