There's value to be had in more competition the "middleman" market, too!
At the moment, on PC there's a healthy competition between the Microsoft Store, Steam, GOG, Epic Games, EA Origin and probably at least a dozen other smaller platforms, some of which are also available on macOS and Linux.
On Android, there's the Play Store, some of the device manufacturers have their own additional stores (Samsung), even carriers have app stores (Vodafone Germany), and enabling a completely independent store like F-Droid is three taps away. The only thing that's unhealthy is how much AOSP functionality got shifted over to the Play Store Services which means that competitors on the OS level (e.g. Amazon's Fire series) have to do a lot of work on reimplementing that to even get basic apps running.
The only platforms where app/game vendors are completely dependent on the mercy of the device vendor is Apple's iDevices and game consoles (Xbox, PS5, Nintendo Switch) - and it's high time for that to end. Users should be free to run whatever they want to run on their devices, and they should be free to decide upon another curator for trustworthyness if they so desire. If the price of that is marginally more expensive hardware, so be it - it should not be allowed to sell stuff as permanent loss leaders anyway, it's unfair business practice.
