That said, I think the niche of casual remote party games would probably work very well here. During the height of the pandemic my friends and I started doing a lot of "remote game nights" with various different kinds of games. However since most of them rarely played games, owned macs and weren't very technically inclined, the games that had the least friction were generally the browser based ones.
Since party games by nature tend to be great at organic advertising and benefit the most from quick easy installs, I think there is a big opportunity here that not many have taken notice to yet.
We use Steam, Xbox Live, PSN, etc not because we wouldn't prefer to use our own store, but because no one cares about anything else.
The reality of you selling your game at a profit without the help of one of these app storefronts is improbable. Keep in mind that even if you somehow become successful in this regard, these storefronts have a vested interested in making sure you and your technologies fail.
Edit: apologies if I seem dire, I'm actually on your side and WISH that the world was a free market without all these gatekeepers. Myself, my partner, and many of my close friends constantly battle with these "gate keepers" as game devs/designers and I wish they would go away, but the market (users) love (to use) them even when they hate them.
Sure but that situation doesn't change by simply distributing a webassembly package through a website. Or rather, that situation is no different than if you distribute a desktop binary through your website. In both cases you are eschewing the storefront.