Occasionally steam updates seem to update bundled libraries in such a way that breaks everything. This results in an error dialog that points you to this knowledge base page: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=9205-OZVN-0660 which in my case did not prove helpful. Using ldd as they suggested showed that everything was seemingly fine- all needed dependencies were present. Instead what proved to be the issue was problematic versions of certain libraries bundled in the steam runtime- the 3 libraries shown below.

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find ~/.local/share/Steam/ -name 'libgpg-error.so*' -delete
find ~/.local/share/Steam/ -name 'libstdc++*' -delete
find ~/.local/share/Steam/ -name 'libgcc_s.so*' -delete

Deleting those 3 bundled libraries forced steam to use the versions of the library that existed system wide, and thus got things working. The solution was found here: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1110384-start-0.html