We're not talking about some shady organization in some ivory tower. Package maintainers are people whose names and email addresses are available to you. Distros are also always looking for volunteers, you can volunteer and steer things the way you want. And if not, then there are dozens of other distros to choose from whose maintainers may agree with you more.

Yes, and look at how well all that fragmentation works.

We're clearly of very different opinions about what personal computing is all about.

Without the "fragmentation" the problem of third parties censoring applications would be even worse and it still wouldn't be any easier to deploy anything. If you want a proprietary centralized service loaded with malware, there are already plenty of those to choose from on other systems, complete with their own gatekeepers.

Neither MacOS nor Windows prevent you from installing any application you desire[0], direct from the vendor. That has only recently begun to change thanks to app stores, which bear a remarkable similarity to package repos.

[0]Ok, there are some hoops regarding unsigned drivers.