Programming and reading.
Not quite correct. For html, that is to signal standard compliance, you can leave it away and the browser will still handle it. For the bash one, all (most) shell scripts use .sh, so you need to give a shebang to tell the loader which executable (sh, bash, zsh, csh, …) to use
Also on Linux xdg does take file extensions into account, just executables do not
You can start steam just fine without the packages. In fact, if you install without them, it’ll ask you to install them every time, but you can skip that and it’ll work, just 32bit games won’t launch
Edit: Looks like I’m partially wrong, as pointed out by a commenter below, steam currently only launches the 32-bit version of the client, despite support for a 5l64-bit client
555 is still in beta, so I wouldn’t be surprised if something doesn’t work. That said, I haven’t experienced what you have (on GTX 1070 TI), though using 555 causes lots of kernel errors for me. Checking dmeg might reveal something in your case as well.
This would likely only hurt the end user. Many use chromium-based browsers, so you’re just driving those away.
You can detect Firefox, so you can do a superficial block in JS, but lemmy is such a simple site that you’d find it hard to find areas where there’s actual differences between the browsers, those usually only come from complex pages like video calling