Valve hired him to work on it full time, then they released Proton (Wine + DXVK) a few months later. Proton likely would never have existed if it weren't for DXVK, and by extension the Steam Deck either wouldn't exist or would use Windows instead, and all the other cool Linux-related stuff Valve have worked on since probably wouldn't have happened.
Desktop Linux's marketshare rising is obviously not exclusively because of the gaming improvements, but it's for sure a huge boon. Good enough for a dumb meme like this, lol
But until your instance upgrades to 0.19.5, the image you originally uploaded but have hence unlinked is still there albeit unused, on the server forever and ever...
I think Valve would have gone ahead without DXVK as well. Either with Gallium Nine or Wine's Direct3D implementation or so. With the Steam Machines they were already on the Linux train before DXVK.