The way Epic are going about it isn't going to get Steam to change anything. All we've learned so far is if you hand a publisher enough money they'll be willing to hold off putting their game elsewhere for a while. Until they're going exclusive without any inducement, Valve isn't going to change a thing. I've no idea how discoverability can be fixed, but I don't think heavy curation is the answer. There are more great games to play that there is enough free time to play them so going that route will leave some worthwhile games out in the cold. GOG's turned down quite a few games I really like.
Valve's philosophy is that
if anybody is using the discovery tools then an obvious metric people would use to filter on would be user reviews... and as a result any games that are terrible crappy asset-flips won't get good reviews so should be easier to ignore and will effectively fade into obscurity. In theory it could work, in the same way that Reddit posts with the most upvotes rise to the top and those with heavy downvotes get hidden...
What they perhaps didn't bank on though is that there are plenty of people out there positively desperate to virtue signal on twitter as hard as they can and plenty of sites wanting to rake in those precious clicks by sensationalising an edgy game that, if not for their involvement, would likely go completely unnoticed by the vast majority of people on the service, and do little but waste the money/time of the dumb kid who put it there
And I agree, Epic aren't going to affect any change here... If they'd come out with a product with a great UI that does everything Steam does without too many flaws, with better QC of the games, and subsidised it to have better prices than Steam whilst also taking a lower cut from developers (which they could have done instead of throwing cash at devs for exclusivity) they could have absolutely shaken things up... People would buy the games on their platform not because they're being
forced to but because it offered a better experience... Then Valve would
have to react in some way by improving their own offering... How can they react to this exclusivity nonsense? Offer devs an even higher payoff to be exclusive to Steam instead? Because that's such an aspirational quality of the Console landscape 2 big companies fighting to out-exclusive each other...