Valve is a lot like a small version of Alphabet in that there are no adults around to make sure people are dilligently finishing and polishing products.
I say this as an developer myself. After a 20 year career of working on other people's businesses and struggling to put my own things together, the whole, "we'll make amazing things if we just get away from management" thing is a gigantic, unproductive trap of thinking. Few programmers have the necessary self-awareness of their own limitations to stick to a problem all the way through to the end.
I think most people do not want to get away from good management. (Not to restrictive, not breathing down your neck, allocating time to do things right, some freedom, giving direction/focus to your company and projects, ...)
I work in a big corp's software science department and this is really how it feels like. Lots of awesome ideas, but everything is just 40%-60% done. And you can't really blame budget or upper management for this, since in our industry it's totally fine to come 10 years late to the party. In this market segment you may still be the first.
You should have lunch with the non-science department guys and see where they're at. I would bet it's pretty similar, not everything but lots of things only 40-60% done, PMs and some devs have lots of awesome ideas that can't all squeeze into the next planning horizon. The difference is things at least get shipped in that state and worked on incrementally with lots of flags to hide the roughest edges, ideally at some point things are worked on enough and declared 90+% "done" and only worked on in maintenance mode but there's always new things shipping half-baked.
I say this as an developer myself. After a 20 year career of working on other people's businesses and struggling to put my own things together, the whole, "we'll make amazing things if we just get away from management" thing is a gigantic, unproductive trap of thinking. Few programmers have the necessary self-awareness of their own limitations to stick to a problem all the way through to the end.