The $100 a year ensures that trash doesn’t litter the App Store and also supports the ongoing development of tooling and management of the store (manual review, Xcode, documentation, distribution, APIs like Metal, etc).

If you’re not committed enough to releasing something with >$100 in value or not committed to releasing something high quality, the App Store doesn’t need you or your app - period.

As a user (and as a dev), I like this. The bar does not need to be lower.

Also if you look at a platform like Unity, the Hobbyist license is $25 a month and the Pro license is $125 a month.