What showed you this in this release? The motherboards compatibility?
Version jumps - Kernel 7.2 while stable SteamOS is on 6.16, and Plasma 6.4.3 straight to 6.7.3 — three desktop releases swallowed at once. The driver (heh) is probably compatibility.
Valve also reversed course on their adoption of iwd (Wifi), and are going back to wpa_supplicant for compatibility with various networks (They ported iwd's fast-resume trick over for parity).
All of the above changes point to maximizing OS compatibility with various devices.