It has little to do with high end machines, though the issue is significant.
It's to do with accepting spyware and advertising on your machine. Both are pernicious and start with the computer, so they are on at all times, even when you are not actually playing this questionable game.
Good luck to you. But I suggest, willingly accepting this nonsense is foolish.
Issue is significant? I have not experienced any issue with steam stealing valuable processing or ram resources for many years. It might have been true when steam was still young but it is certainly not true now. Even at this moment steam is only using 100 MB ram of my 16 Gigs. My CPU usage only being at around 5% with my i5 2500K @ 4.5 Ghz which also includes Opera browser with 15 tabs open, VLC playing a mkv file and myself chatting with a few friends on steam + being afk on teamspeak.
About the spyware and advertising. So what? That's how steam earns their money, by getting people to buy the games they are advertising with a simple pop-up the first time you launch the application. Also, the pop-up only usually includes newly released games. Since I leave my PC on all the time I rarely see this. Their advertising is probably based on your previous search results done inside the steam application or based on previous bought games. Amazon does this. Facebook does this. Google does this, and even Gmail reads your emails and tells google what to suggest you. Some applications or websites let you switch off that features, some do not.
I like having a program such as steam because I can log in to any computer I want and start downloading my games with ease without having to play around with DVDs or what not. It auto-updates my games to the latest version. Lets me keep in contact with friends and makes it easier for me to organize events by using their community section. It has also the epic steam "Workshop" feature which lets you install mods at ease. If the only negative side of it is getting epic sales every few weeks with games being priced as low as 5-10 euros sometimes or getting a simple pop-up everytime you launch the application, then so be it.
I'll continue "riding" the good luck train, as I have for the last 10 years with steam.