The consoles have enough garbage as well. Like "life of black tiger" which is a bad console port of a horrible mobile game. Its trailer is featured on the official PlayStation channel even though it's apparently using copyrighted background music without permission. Nobody knows why Sony allowed this all to happen.
But to be fair the Play Store definitely has more of such low-quality games.
Yes, the quality net has holes in it, and since 1983 not all decisions were done correctly.
Yet it is still better than not having a net at all, leading to a bunch of "Hello World" games, half finished game demos, copy cats that dilute branding.
Alone on iOS there are around 3000 submissions per month on average, even taking around 50% away for updates, it still leaves us with an enormous amount of low quality games to triage, per month.
I don't buy that as a justification to create a walled-garden. Curation and quality control don't require locking everything down; it doesn't make the manual review process any less expensive.
What it does do is make it less expensive to exert total control over the associated branding. This might seem like a good thing for customers if this branding wasn't already for sale to the the highest bidder, but it is. The practice of hardware manufacturers paying for exclusives proves this.
The play store is not really relevant to what I was talking about because
it is intentionally not curated. There will always be at least one place like
this where the developers who can't afford the expensive fees to get on the
curated stores will congregate. It also seems irrelevant to me to keep referring
to the "crash of 1983" when that was very obviously caused by Atari having a
monopoly, i.e. the exact opposite of there being an open market for hardware.
I personally have avoided many game development communities for exactly the reasons
you describe — overly extreme fear of "copy cats" to the point of paranoia, coupled with way too much enthusiasm to adopt certain pieces of cargo-culted technology without considering the question of who will
support it and for how long. I think Godot is a step in the right direction, but it will take these companies time to let go of these other APIs that cost them high prices just for the privilege of being able to read the documentation. They are not immune to these price dynamics.
But to be fair the Play Store definitely has more of such low-quality games.