I agree that’s very annoying sometimes but at the same time very beneficial for in-game performance as it greatly reduces the amount of computations the game has to do at runtime. If you have a powerful enough PC or the game isn’t very demanding you can just disable shader pre-caching in steam settings and it shouldn’t matter much but it’s a real life saver for more demanding titles and imo worth all that wait.

I’m afraid that in the near future most developers are going to completely abandon the idea of maintaining and creating ports for linux and instead make sure that the game works well enough on proton. I’m not sure how to feel about that though.