I think a problem is that people are compelled to vote on every catagory to get that sweet, sweet useless gift. Making them vote for the only name they have played and/or heard of in every catagory.
At least the trolls make it obvious they're not voting sincerely. Steam awards are a popularity contest where the categories don't really matter, so I'm just glad less people will take the results seriously this time around.
I don't think there's really any trolling going on (at least enough that it matters), just that people vote for what they know or recognize, like you said a popularity contest. Three of the titles in the Innovative Gameplay section are pretty niche, no matter how good they are. Even Remnant 2 is dwarfed by Starfield sales, so the latter just becomes the default choice for most people.
If there was any other big name AAA title on the list, I think Starfield could have lost.
The issue starts even earlier, with the fact that you're encouraged to nominate games that you may not have even played. I think the only game released this year that I've played was Cities: Skylines 2, which I didn't feel deserved anything, so I just punched in whatever games I could find that had released this year.
And then, yeah, I totally just clicked choices for all the votes for awards too. I didn't really care, I didn't play any of the choices anyway.
This year you could skip a category, and it would still count towards the badge / stickers / whatever, but I don't think that was made clear at a glance. It was explained in the FAQ, but who reads that, when you could just click whatever and be done?
Maybe that was just for the nominations though, I don't remember checking for the actual vote.