Important note is the demo was never available for download through steam, only via the website of the listed developer. Valve/Steam have only removed the store page listing.
TechCrunch's writer here just appears to be lazy as hell. Here's a better article: https://www.thegamer.com/steam-gets-second-game-in-as-many-months-that-adds-malware-to-your-pc/
Honestly the Reddit thread is the best of the bunch though if you want more details
Better than that, the lack of reliance on spinning disks means that asset duplication and data read order is less of a requirement to reduce load times. It can still be argued that there's just too many polygons, since simply scaling things back would be plenty effective in reducing storage usage and load times.