Eh... again, Valve being a private company plays a role here. Whoever succeeds Gabe will likely be chosen by Gabe, not some board or activist investor looking to maximize short term profit. There is much more freedom in private orgs to make long term strategic decisions.

The 10 years Valve took between Steam machines was invested (wisely, I think) in Linux infrastructure like Wayland, Wine/Proton, GPU and audio drivers, etc. None of which Valve will have to repeat.

To make my point, there was only 1.5 years between the release of the Steam Deck, and Steam Deck OLED, and that involved a new silicon tapeout.