After all the ruckus recently about the Dolphin Emulator for Wii and GameCube coming to Steam, and then being blocked - the team has now given up with the Steam release.
Honestly, I don't need my FOSS stuff from Steam. Steam is a great platform, but I'd rather get open software from an open platform (meaning my distro's package manager, or flathub as a fallback). Let FOSS support FOSS. Let Steam be a way to keep the proprietary stuff contained in its own walled garden (even if the walls on said garden aren't very high).
I kinda doubt Steam would allow for cloud saves on an emulator because they wouldn't want potentially copyrighted data ending up in Steam cloud saves if a game saved DLC content or something to a save file. RetroArch is on Steam but I don't think it supports cloud saves last time I tried it on my Steam Deck. In RetroArch's situation, the non-Steam version has more core support than the Steam version so I end up using the non-Steam version (which is also provided via EmuDeck).
Edit: I've been corrected, looks like Steam Cloud would be a legitimately useful reason for Dolphin on Steam. I didn't realize saves worked on RetroArch.
i can see it both ways. for technical folks, nothing beats a package manager. in terms of getting your emulator i’m front of the masses there is absolutely no question that Steam is the platform that makes that easiest.