This number is basically useless except for headlines like this. Actually using my steam deck I don’t care at all about the verification status. There’s plenty of unsupported and unknown stuff that works well, and there’s verified games I’ve run into issues with. Playable is also a particularly bad category because it’s weirdly picky about certain things but not others, and it seems to be rarely updated when games get patches, so stuff can get better or worse than it’s labeled. I just check ProtonDB or look up youtube videos of someone playing a game on deck if I want to check something.
It sometimes was but there were good alternatives for that. The much bigger problem imo was the lack of a dpad, using the trackpad for that was abysmal.