No... many people actually appreciate the walled garden as consumers.
One hoop. Turn on one setting, from there it's just clicking to download an apk and approving the dialog box.
The real reason it's hard to distribute your application outside of Play store is discovery.
I and my software friends/colleagues might be capable of avoiding this malware (assuming you don’t consider Zoom and such to be malware), but my family and everyone else I know are not. I suspect 70+% of the user base could easily be tricked into installing malware that would spam them with sex notifications, hijack their search engine, etc.
This isn't even hypothetical. Spotify already refuses to add features to the Apple Watch.
This discussion is moot. Apple only has to lower it's cut to cost + a reasonable markup instead of abusing it's position to charge 30%. Then everybody can be happy.
Also, there is no reason to believe any percentage is too high or too low. 30% is what Apple has charged since day 1 when it had no position whatsoever. You will need to explain exactly at which point in time 30% became problematic.
In the end it doesn't matter how Apple and Google got to this duopoly position of power, if it was fair or of they had to work hard. The fact that matters is where they are now.
Most of the "Hackers" of my generation grew up to either vacuum up user data without their consent, micro-target advertising (including political propaganda), or fund those that do the above two things.
I used to subscribe to the NYT and made the mistake of not subscribing using Apple's subscriptions mechanism. When I wanted to cancel for a while, I had to go through a whole spiel with their sales rep to get them to honor my cancellation. With other subscription services on Apple (like many the TV streaming subscriptions) cancelling is a couple of standard clicks and you're done. No questions asked. I've cancelled and re-subscribed to thing like HBO multiple times because of it, but I will never be resubscribing to the NYT again.
I don't want 90 different ways to cancel 90 different subscriptions from 90 different stores for 90 different apps on my phone, so yeah I do appreciate having one place to do it, and I wish it were harder for developers to skirt the App Store infrastructure to push their own consumer-hostile options.