No, I'm using the Itch Launcher to play my games, the only game i had a similar behavior from before was Tetris Effect launched through the Xbox App, which forcibly opens SteamVR. However,
I also looked through the files of the game trying to fix it on my own, and maybe its because of some default third party binaries in unreal (i could find them under "\Concentric\Engine\Binaries\ThirdParty"). Deleting OpenVR and Oculus leads to the game crashing shortly after Startup, but also SteamVR not opening.
Currently, the only way to prevent this is to entirely uninstall SteamVR, as it opens up even when steam is fully closed and exited out of.