I never said epic made wine.

Wine is like 99% of proton. Historically it was mostly sposored by Collabora and I think they were doing it so they clould run some windows programs on mac (my memory is fuzzy, was a long time ago).

Valve came later. There were already out-of-tree patches speciffically for games. The wine team didn't put those in because they are hacks while wines aim is 100% compatibility with windows.

As those patches grew, stuff like wine-staging emerged that would massage those patches into what the wine project would accept. And even later proton was born (i think from some guys repo, i think valve hired him).

If you want to attribute something to valve, then ACO is a better option. It's amazing.

I'm just a bit annoyed that nobody praises wine while everybody speaks like it was all valve.