He is and I distinctly remember one clip where he bragged that his game was piracy proof because the save system uses steam achievements. Conveniently ignoring the fully working steam backend emulators out there used to run every game whose sole DRM is the Steam Store.
Running both rn with the same magnitude of mau and piefed is using significantly fewer resources. Unless you expect 100s of mau’s I say ignore the concerns about piefed’s scalability.
As for apps, those are more or less in the pipeline, piefed didn’t have an API at all until a while ago and it’s just now getting to a point where it’s reasonable for developers to implement it. Voyager recently added Piefed support and iirc Photon also works with Piefed.