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Does Steam have a local or online log for the updates downloaded to the games installed on your PC? Preferably one that lists technical stuff like manifest id/build id.

Hiccup
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There are multiple ways to see the changes of a game, each one of them shows different information:

Changelog for recent updates

The Your Games & Software section of Recently Updated shows simple changelogs written by the developers.

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Changelog for old updates

If you want to search for old updates, you can try the News section of a game, with the filter of Official Announcements enabled.

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Technical information (size, files changed, hashes, etc.)

If you want the technical information of the update on the other hand, you can try SteamDB. First, go to https://steamdb.info and search for the application or game that you are looking for. After that, you should see a window like this one:

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On the top right area, click Patchnotes. You should see something like this:

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Over there you can select the day of the update to get the technical changes of it, like the manifest, build id and the files that got changed:

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Lemon
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  • This is helpful, but I'm afraid I'm looking for a local log to find manifests that steamdb hasn't recorded. – Hiccup Oct 06 '19 at 09:16
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    All of the Steam logs are located at C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\logs, maybe start looking there? Also if is public, SteamDB is going to have it indexed. – Lemon Oct 06 '19 at 09:32
  • I'll have a look in the logs folder. SteamDB does tend to have everything, but I think older (or removed) manifests are an exception. You can find depots that were definitely released on a certain date - but you can't find manifests on that date. – Hiccup Oct 06 '19 at 11:15
  • Unfortunately it seems like old log entries are auto-deleted. – Hiccup Oct 06 '19 at 11:27
  • If you really want to go all-out on finding those changes, follow the steps on this answer that I posted on February to see how a Steam game can be downgraded. Then, just compare the changes with external tools. – Lemon Oct 06 '19 at 12:56
  • That's what I intend to do once I find the manifest, but the problem is steamdb doesn't have all manifests... – Hiccup Oct 06 '19 at 13:03
  • *manifest ID, I should say – Hiccup Oct 06 '19 at 18:12