To me, the interesting bit here is less about Steam in particular, but about the industry overall.
Fourteenthousand games. That’s insane. Sure, the vast majority is going to be asset flips and shovelware crap, probably a lot of AI generated spam games in there, too. But the sheer amount is still staggering. That’s a fair few games compared to when I started gaming in 1987, playing Squirm on a C16 with a tape drive.
Marketing hasn’t been a viable way of gaining sales for years. No one watches ads, no one watches sponsored content, it doesn’t translate into sales. If you have a mega budget to put your ads on the side of the road, maybe, not for most.
Also remember there are more platforms than steam, I know you want to hope that steam won’t do something bad but you should remember steam does not exist in a vacuum and that steam does bad things for profit too.
The entire success of Vampire Survivors is built on accidental free marketing. For the first month of launch the peak players for Vampire survivors was 14 players. Then one youtuber made a video about the game and the next day it was 1000+ player peak. The some other guy started streaming it and Northernlion saw it. He then made a few videos and from there it just snowballed into one of the biggest games of 2022.
The success of Dave the Diver was clearly a marketing effort, it went from 700 player in early access to being The indie hit of 2023 days after release. And to show you don’t have to make a good game to get the word out, the reason people even know about “The Day Before” is because of marketing. That game was complete crap, but you had big youtubers and streamers talking about it because clearly their marketing strategy was on point. And finally it’s not just indie games, do you think Capcom launching a campaign to reinvigorate Monster hunter World has had no impact on the sales of a 5 year old game?
Marketing absolutely does work. If you want more you can always lurk /r/gamedev to see game developers discuss how to market games. You can look at it this way, either you’re smarter than the entire game dev subreddit (because nobody there goes “marketing is pointless”) or you’re wrong about it not being viable.
You do see how that part is entirely fearmongering? You’re pretty much saying that Steam has done bad things so we should expect them to also do this one bad thing and thinking Steam wouldn’t do it is just being hopeful. And if Steam for some reason actually won’t do it then there are other stores besides Steam that could do this bad thing.
Nothing even indicates that it might be a possibility beyond you just believing it is a possibility.