Your gut instinct is completely right, I hope that the Godot mods won't mind me having a rant but I'll try and keep it professional here because of the nature of this forum. I'll be blunt though, I feel like steam has lost a lot of it's clout these days, it's not a place for indie games to sell their titles anymore, it's a place for people as you point out to asset flip games and post up what I call meme games that usually have a flurry of excitement for about two weeks and then everybody forgets it ever existed.
To add insult to injury, even after all this time, you still have to pay an upfront fee of £70 odd just to even list your game, meaning you're in the red before you even get any sales. That hurts an indie dev looking to make a name for themselves, it might not seem that much if you're lucky enough to already have a significant following but very often uploading to steam is one of the only ways you can get noticed. These days though? I think you're right, I think there's too much garbage flooding that platform and too many meme games, but not only that the steam reviews have now turned to garbage as well. Instead of it being any plays to get reliable feedback I'm 99% sure a lot of the reviews are scammers, bots, angry people ( Sometimes justifiably so ) and people reposting memes that you may have found funny a few years ago but it gets tedious seeing them every single time on every single steam game. Even being a customer is pretty annoying on steam because you look up the reviews hoping to get some kind of proper feedback and it's just idiots posting crap on there the majority of the time unless they've played the game and are mad about it.
I highly, highly recommend putting your game on itch.io, it will save you a lot of agony, not only that the back end of itch.io is very straightforward compared to steam. I found it incredibly annoying to deal with whereas with itch you just upload your game, select your price, fill out the information and then click upload, wonderfully painless.
Business wise as well I find itch is better, you have a higher percentage, I believe the default is 90% to you, 10% to itch, whereas with steam it's 70% to you and 30% to them. With itch as well you can do proper DRM free releases compared to steam where you're required to have that server in order to download.
https://itch.io/updates/introducing-open-revenue-sharing
I hope this information helps, I strongly recommend going with Itch over Steam because that's what I'm doing now, I've gotten pretty fed up with that platform overall and I don't want to be a part of the problem of why there aren't enough legit competitors out there offering alternatives to platforms like steam. I just thought I'd post some proper personal experience on what I've been finding out as what I would call myself a startup indie dev.
