When I ran Windows 7, I was pretty fastidious about cpu consumption, and never observed Steam consuming more than 1-2 CPU percent on average assuming it was col

When I ran Windows 7, I was pretty fastidious about cpu consumption, and never observed Steam consuming more than 1-2 CPU percent on average assuming it was collapsed to the system tray and wasn't downloading game updates in the background. I don't think there's any grand conspiracy like you make it out to be, perhaps you've had an outlier experience.