> never pay for something with DRM you cannot remove
I take this to mean to sail the seas but I have apprehension over running modified binaries from random people. Is there anything that can be done to alleviate this worry?
It's not a great solution, but you can vote with your wallet and simply not partake in that form of entertainment. I can't say it's fun to be not up on current games, or to find indie/non-drm games to play. But piracy is just an end-around a terribly policy of non-ownership that manages to both not remunerate the folks who do the work and make no impact on the actual problem which is that we don't like the non-ownership clause in modern games.
So yeah, TLDR, vote with your wallet and give up the entertainment this time.
the same way you should run _all_ proprietary binaries. restricted inside a sandbox. linux makes that easy with flatpaks.