This is a ret-con. If you - as a user - were philosophically and inherently against the App Store, then it may seem that way, I guess?

The reality is that there was a long period of time where Apple built up lots of goodwill with a developer ecosystem that exceeded by many orders of magnitude the pre-iPhone OS X indie Mac developer scene.

There were many, many developers that hadn’t even touched a Mac before the iPhone came out, and were happy with Apple, and now are certainly not.