+1, Valve seems to be refusing / not following standard linux ways of doing things, e.g. how the software is installed (by replacing it by their own problematic update process).
I am not asking for Valve to change their infrastructure for internal matters (such as updating the client and games -- that is outside the scope of this bug report), only with this specific, supposed to be rarely updated section of steam. They must play by the same rules as all other software on linux.
Steam's behavior has been changed.
Sidebar: the relaunch bug wasn't resulting from privileges; it relaunched on close regardless.
Nothing extracted yet.
This is now a recurring theme of steam, no, you can not update files controlled by the package manager without going through the minimal effort of updating the package. Please stop asking the user for root access as to bypass the package manager as it violates standard security principles inherent to linux distributions and encourages users to become desensitized to inappropriate privilege escalation.
If you, the Valve Linux team, want to update /usr/bin/steam, it must be done through the package manager.
Edit: Also, steam relaunches once on normal exit if the user refuses to let Steam have root access.