Still all a bit tinfoil hat for me...but I admire your resiliance all the same.
I DID have a paypal account years ago, i needed it for some ebay stuff i did back then, but over the last decade we have seen a huge push from the Chinese, Russian and N.Koreans in terms of hacking 'western' companies. So i decided to scale back my exposure to that.
I never was a Steam fan (had early discussions with some of the developers and we disagreed on the 'always online' aspect built into it's dna etc) and have watched it grow to totally dominate and i would argue distort PC gaming.
Sure it did 'save' PC gaming in the dark days of console dominance in the AAA's but that time is well past, but the influence of Steam is nearly all pervasive and growing more so; just look at the mess of MP in NMS (GOG vs Steam versions) and other games, Steams built in mod plug-ins (and how that influences a games ability to be enjoyed without Steam etc).
I avoid third-party clients, and for any offline game, any sort of persistent DRM.
Epic Games seems to require the use of their launcher to install and play titles from their store, so that rules out my patronage. Same goes for anything that requires Steam, uPlay, or Origin.
100% with you on all that, however while i did need the Epic Games installer to download Subnautica, i do not need it to run the game, i can launch the games .exe directly. Now it seems a recent patch to the Epic Games installer has disabled that, which is another reason i dislike clients like Steam that decide to update stuff that might break functionality (for me). I have since unistalled the Epic Games installer (as i don't need it for anything else) and can still play Subnautica. I feel a little bad about that, but we need less 'Steam-likes' and more GOG-likes in the game space imho (just for the DRM free aspect).
Everything your bank knows about you is online. It's still true that there is less exposure than if you spread the info around various e-tailers, but banks can be, and occasionally are, compromised.
Well i have faith a bank will fully reimburse me if they get hacked, and sort out the mess of that. I have less faith in that happening if those details have been stolen from all manner of third party sites.