I am an indie developer already. It would be possible to avoid VC, if startups weren't able to offer everything for free for long periods of time. Competing at a the level of skill instead would be nice, their product certainly does not require a team or funding TBH.

Hell there's even a timeseries startup, been around for ~5 years, they had no clue how to write databases, got paid for 3 years to finally realize columnar makes sense for analytics... no offence to them but you see this all the time, re-loaders with some vague trivial "vision", bunch of clueless VCs and buzzwords, and boom they have millions. It's such a sad way to compete, at least have the skills first. It's like no one wants to actually earn things these days.