Finished Elden Ring and Sekiro solely on Steam Deck. Not only its comfortable, but back buttons are so good for additional actions during fights like browsing through items and spells and consume item mid fight while running and rolling and rotating camera. I really miss back buttons when I am playing on anything else.
I bought Steam Deck specifically for my old already purchased game which were NEVER on handheld devices like Fallout 1 2 3 New Vegas, Deus Ex games, Mass Effect games, first 2 Witchers and also old Need for Speeds. While Nintendo is doing subscribtion service for their 8bit games (lol), companies like EA and Bethesda probably hate money (/s) so they never ported their games on Switch and Steam Deck just filled this hole on the market with additional bonus I dont need to pay again for all these games I already own on PC.
Plus you are right, new games are very bad and expensive. Look at Witcher 3 or RDR2, one is 8 years old, second 5 years old game and new releases from this year can’t compete with them in terms of size, content, even graphics is still better in these old titles than in New Games. Look on overhyped Hogwarts for example. Running on Unreal 4 and looks worse and plays worse than RDR2 and Witcher 3 (while stealing gameplay elements especially from RDR2 like distributing side quests during main quest line).
And Hogwarts is one of better games this year together with RE4, Dead Space (both are just remakes), then we have Baldurs Gate 3, which is amazing game and it will sure win GOTY or something is wrong with world and Lies of P was really nice surprise, but it is just rip off of Dark Souls/Bloodborne. But all these games except BG3 are not as epic as legendary titles from last 10 years.
I also like to pick up games from indie studios which turn out to be epic. Kingdom Come is prime example, or Hades or Dead Cells. But I am not aware something great and surprising like this was released this year, maybe Lies of P is that game.