Revoking signatures and disabling the apps on user devices to protect your business model is definitely anti-consumer in my book.
You could easily see Apple revoking signatures because of DMCA claims. Even faulty ones, like the claim RIAA made against youtube-dl on GitHub.
The only anti-consumer behavior in your situation came from Epic who knowingly violated the rules as a PR stunt.
Exactly. Never forget, it was Epic who threw their users under the bus, not Apple.
Epic expected you to be a soldier in their fight. They expected you to make a sacrifice you were not willing to make.
That's entirely on Epic.
Even though I agree that in the Epic case, most of the blame lies with Epic, I still have a problem with Apple: the signature revocation system is used for more things than removing malware. I think it is user hostile and anti consumer to disable installed apps on other grounds, because the users might be dependent on them.
I'd like to be able to run programs and apps on my machine that are not Apple-approved.
I thought you could anyway. You would right-click the app in Finder and choose Open — from then on, it would continue to open.
Or is that a different mechanism?