Which is still gambling, just on the contents of the next box. It’s obfuscating the gambling, and it’s unfortunately working.
Ultimately, it's their storefront, so who they do business with - and the terms of that business - is their choice (as is so often argued when free speech and platforms comes up here on HN). Competition exists, in the form of other hardware and other OSes (though, Epic's Fortnight was kicked off Google's store for the same reason as it was kicked off Apple's).
I already have a cloud footprint as my apps depend on it. The bulk of that 4% is in payment processing. The rest is just background noise on my hosting bills.
Yet you do have a desire for it to run on Apple's hardware, under Apple's OS. And thus you have a desire to do business with them. That you disagree with their rules for doing business by itself doesn't make them the bad guy.
They're offering many of the same terms offered by Microsoft, Google (Android Play store and Stadia), and Sony after all.
This is a problem that's bigger than Apple, and it's not a problem that will be solved by allowing more stores on the phone - it won't make it somehow "your" hardware.
You can blame Apple for doing this with their phone all you want, but you're fighting against the tide with a shovel. It's an industry standard to lock hardware down to the point where they'd rather the hardware be bricked (the Nintendo Switch and its hardware fuses) than run "libre" software on it.
But, as I pointed out in a sibling reply, this hardware, firmware, and OS is, practically speaking, not ours. No matter how much as we’d like it to be.
But my main point was that trying to frame it as heroic Apple against evil Epic, where Apple tries to save their users from gambling by taking a large cut of the loot, isn't entirely truthful.