To be a pioneer is to be the first to do something. In the context of American pioneers, they were Western settlers, who intended to actually live in the place rather than just chart it. If you put enough qualifiers in front of it that I don't think are necessary to the argument, like "single player", then sure, they were probably pioneers. I can find an old RTS from a failed digital distribution platform a few years earlier that also seems to qualify, but fine. Even still, there's no world where we didn't have Steam and then online DRM didn't become standard, because you'd have to ignore the world we lived in post-Napster that led to iTunes, which had online DRM at the time. The lack of it in video games was likely due to middleware partners having not invented the solution for it yet, but I guarantee you they were working on it (SecuROM was only a few years later), as both piracy and used copies were the enemy of the video game industry for decades, and aggressive DRM measures at the time would even negatively interface with and end up breaking some users' disc drives. Combine that with how lucrative MMOs were turning out to be for their recurring revenue, and there was no way we weren't rapidly converging on exactly what Steam and live service games ended up being.

The Steam hate back then was as prevalent as you say, and it earned it, particularly back then.