I was lured to use it during those days as well because of all the cool and wildly different screenshots I had seen. I did manage to get it working and looking super cool, but it was fragile and complex. It was so easy to fully break it in my experience. I tried to use it again about 8-10 years ago and while it was easier than the 90s, it was more trouble than I was willing to put up with for a DE these days. Especially since Gnome (with extension) and KDE could trivially look nice.
It isn’t as seamless as Steam, but using Lutris or Heroic are the way to go if the games doesn’t have a native Linux version available on gog