Yeah, that's really annoying - it steals focus once upon launching, another time upon loading and another time when the news popup opens.

I had the same issue and you can do this by editing your Steam shortcut and adding -silent to the arguments.

steam is not a drm-free platform like GOG or Epic Games (some epic games games have additional drm, but most are completely drm-free and there's no client-level drm at all like in steam*).
Most games use the Steam API to check stuff, so Steam client needs to be running.
(I'm actually kinda ok with steam's drm btw, it's not as intrusive as on some other stuff)

Or the window popping up when you exit steam from the system tray just to show you "steam stutting down" and a spinning icon for 5 seconds.

Please

Yes if you go to 20 years ago

Isnt this possible? I do it with blender. Just right click the icon of the game and pin it to your taskbar then click it when you wanna launch the game

You mean just the UI popping up or steam itself? Because it's up to individual games if they implement any steam drm, and if so how much.

i usually just disable autostsrtup for basically everything that doesn't need to be running for my system to work or productivity tools (like sharex and powertoys)

Jersey Fried Chicken?