Go ahead and buy a gift months in advance
Now, if a recipient already has the title, or just doesn't want it, they can click decline and the purchase is refunded directly to the gift giver
Grargar: Will Steam seriously refund you if you bought a declined gift, say, 3 months ago? Will the refund be in cash, or in Steam wallet?
I would imagine to Steam wallet.
This move is clearly intended to kill the reselling of gifts on G2A and the like. There's a lot of whine and cry because people liked to make profit from reselling games but for normal consumers I doubt they'll notice much difference. It's not like you can't gift games anymore.
The only thing I think they should still implement is a way to pay premium price for gifts if you live in lower price countries so it still allows you to gift games to people outside of your region, pretty much like GOG changed it so you can only gift games at premium price a while ago.