Do you really believe that?
This never was my problem.
In my case one of the bigger pragmatical points against DRM is, that my WindowsXP is categorically offline since support ended and I also use WINE in my primary OS, clients get directly in the way of both.
I also just don't want to support anti-consumer behaviour and neither do piracy, which also makes my choice between games easier.

Same and worse is happening to me all the time also because of the refusal of dairy/egg containing products, alcoholic beverages and even weed (which is also very common here).
Many people are immensely offended by a simple "no thanks" and later on preach about how intolerant "vegans/antialcoholics/the DRM-free crowd/straight edge people/*insert people doing any other abstinence* are, oh the irony...

Maybe sometimes it's that. Other times I get dragged into one, end up explaining what DRM-free and all that means, and suddenly get met with a cold "who cares, you're conspiracy theorist nut" or "I've ben using Steam for years and it never failed to me ONCE so your claims are a lie" or other similar bits.

I don't think its just drm, its everything digital nowadays. Every last consumer right has been watered down to nothing. Games, online only, drm tv via Netflix or amazon only, phones linked to online accounts, facebook having vast algorithms working tirelessly across all data, phones tracking all your movements. Its funny that nobody seems to care about any of it until they are losing out or its used against them. So no, the don't care about it, or in fact any privacy or ownership of any kind, why should they, its not like they have to work for anything, just carry on with the media studies degree and let china or somewhere undercut your economies providing crap you should make yourself.
The scales of course will shift again as they always do.

Casual gamers most likely won't care about DRM, so that leaves us with "serious" gamers. The latter are more likely to get upset when something changes their experience. The trend today seems to be for game studios to release their games too soon, and very likely part of the reason they want to "force" their games to be online is so they can easily fix their games after release. And having their target market online also makes it easier to market new games to those gamers, unless they abuse it and start putting gamers off by doing things such as advertising content ingame which rather breaks the fourth wall...

In the short run, I expect "serious" modern gamers to cave into developers and let them control their gaming experiences. However, I expect a few nasty experiences to change their views in the long run, whether it be corrupted or lost online saves or forced patches that change their gaming experiences in ways they don't appreciate, or just being unable to play their games when they want to because their internet connection or the developer's servers are down, or worst case scenario, the developer pulls the game completely.

My personal view, the more you give others control over you, the less control you have. And once you give up control, it's not that easy to get it back.

With Galaxy becoming more prominent and the GOG Downloader having been "retired", I've recently finished downloading over 500 of my GOG games and have made a pact not to buy more games until I am ready to download them immediately, and I won't buy/download them until they've been released for a while and I can see the offline installers are being patched.

I know GOG have said that they'll always be DRM-free, but organisations can change as the people within them change.

Denuvo has a very loud anti-fanbase because it's good at what it does. Not because it's DRM that negatively affects legitimate gamers. I've read very few cases where people are actually impacted by Denuvo. The huge amount of negativity is because it negatively affects pirates. Because pirates have been dealing with not being able to play certain games that carry Denuvo for extended periods of time since it came out. And the amount of pirates out there vastly outnumbers the people who legitimately care about DRM. That's where the large amount of negativity towards Denuvo comes from.

From what I gathered, the large amount of negativity towards Denuvo comes primarily from the fact that it impacts performance quite heavily in a very bad way.

The problem with DRM like Steam, is it's not a problem until it is a problem, then its a problem with very few options.

While that might sound silly its true.

For a single player with good internet access, the chances of Steams DRM getting in the way is almost non existent.

However, once that chap's (or chappess') situation changes, Steams DRM can become a serious issue stopping legitimate use of their software.

Unfortunately for every gamer that grows up gets a partner and starts to have kids, there are a dozen of Single 14 to 20 somethings that start to use Steam with no issues,

I have no idea where you gathered that but it's absolute nonsense. In fact, some of the games with Denuvo are among the best running games of recent years.

It's hard to find proof for either side of this debate but at least I have found something:
http://www.game-debate.com/news/22656/denuvo-pc-performance-impact-tested-doom-benchmarks-with-and-without-denuvo-drm

If it really uses a whole CPU core, systems with a low amount of processors may be affected way more than an i7 for example, but since it's all confidential information, it's hard to say.

Impact overall has been shown to be extremely minimal. There's been next to no proof showing any performance impact that would actually be detrimental to gameplay unless you go into computers that would start having issues with the game anyway. On top of that you have games like MGSV and Mad Max that ran like a dream on the PC despite having Denuvo.

I don't doubt there's games with Denuvo that have bad performance, but so far, all signs point to that being because of the usual, the game itself.

Looking back in time, I wonder if that's because gamers had more options such as no-CD cracks. I have working cracks for virtually all the retail games I own, and I only stopped buying games when Steam started to take over the PC gaming market. It's only since GOG surfaced that I started buying games again, although admittedly many of them being the same games as the retail games I already owned, just without the need to use cracks. I always regret not buying TOCA3 before GOG stopped selling it, but I own retail copies of TOCA2 and TOCA3, so I don't really know why I care.

I'd submit that many Steam users who claim not to care about DRM, do so in the belief that if Steam closes, they'll have the means to keep access to their games, one way or the other.

So looking at the present and the future, It's the online-only single-player games that are upsetting many of us classic gamers. And there might be no workarounds to keeping access to those games if the developers choose to shut them down forever.

Not to mention Syberia 3 starts up 40s faster without Denuvo than with it. Denuvo has always affected performance to some degree, most people legally buying the game are simply unaware of it because they have no before / after to compare it with.

* cough * Do you mean those graphics whores on every gamer forum under modern gamers ?

No they don't.

Almost every technological device used by modern gamers and millennials has some form of DRM in it such as iphone, imac, cell phones, 4K televisions, laptops etc.

There is no escape.