I think Epic definitely fucked some things up, but I really think the takeaway is that, if anyone has any hope for competing, they are absolutely going to need exclusives. This has been studied in the economics literature. In order for a newcomer to compete, you need exclusives. The dominant platform will automatically get the big titles, and players aren’t going to switch platforms to get the same titles they could’ve gotten without switching.
How did Valve get gamers to switch from physical boxed games to Steam? Exclusives. There was actually a digital distribution platform that predated Steam (run by Stardock), and it was more feature complete than Steam when Steam came out. But it didn’t have any exclusives, so it died out in favor of the (at the time) more spartan Steam platform.
Love or hate exclusives, nobody ever gets anywhere in the marketplace without them.