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You're creating strawmen here, but it's funny you mention Epic since, yes, they were more than willing to do that, and they have done that. As soon as they were allowed to do so.

Of course Apple will close the Store and make apps impossible if they could not extract their fee. That was the plan with the original iPhone and HTML only web apps in its browser. Then they got a more profitable idea.

For the apps to go away the store for free must be imposed on Apple, Google and everybody else but I don't think it will ever happen. If it will, people will use the browser and that would be enough. Some JS APIs will be dismissed, some hardware will be removed, some functionality will become impossible and slowly forgotten. Nobody will cry too much and business and entertainment as usual.

Unfortunately xcode and app distribution is mandated by apple. Using cryptographic keys they stand in the way of "owners" of phones from loading non-apple-approved software.

even the name "sideloading" has come into being. When the PC first came out it was just "running".