The scams are likely to some from outside Play. In the US, these scams don't run because iPhone is the dominant platform and side loading in iOS is not possible. In the rest of world they are widespread.
I’m betting on the latter. No Kitboga video mentions custom Android apps. What actually appears on almost all videos are online ads/spam or fake celebrity accounts messaging random people on Facebook.
It's funny how you aggressively push solutions that ignore the most common scam vectors investigators encounter. Could it be a coincidence that your proposal conveniently places every aspect of people’s lives at the mercy of big businesses? Or that the scam vector you downplay, ads and social media, just happens to be cash cows for some of the richest companies in history?
We already have plenty of paid lobbyists cheering the transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest. There's no need to do that dirty work for free. Weaponizing the elderly being scammed of their life savings while protecting those that benefit from it is beyond messed up.
They let so much malware in their stores already.
As somebody put it, Google goes after others without cleaning their own house first. It's just abuse of power at this point.
Don't mistake obscurity for security. FDroid isn't the size to even be noticed by problems that Play Store and AppStore are dealing with.
Now, it might be a problem of vetting at scale or malware being really subtle, but if that's the case Google should focus on improving their process before locking down Android for "security".