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"You will most likely get a malicious AppImage from some website because there is no default central store with such packages." - No. Just no. If you download the AppImage directly from its original author's website, then you know that no one has tampered with it and it is exactly as the original author intended. In contrast, look at Flathub. Most applications there are not provided by their original authors, but by "random guys". Who do you trust more?

imho the only way to get this solved is users and app developers using a community based format that is not owned by the operating system companies

It depends on how often the stuff in the packages gets updated, not on the package format.

Have you read the article? AppImage wins by a factor of two to three in terms of speed and size, runs on both Red Hat and Ubuntu. I'd say it is more universal than the distro-made formats.

Why do you find them annoying? I love them. Every application is just one file that I can freely move and copy around, can't be any simpler than that.

The AppImage is still twice as fast as the Flatpak, and three times as fast as the Snap. So it can't be the application itself, can it?

3 seconds (AppImage) vs. 7 seconds (Flatpak) vs. 13 seconds (Snap) is a HUGE difference for me. No matter how modern the hardware

You can run multiple different versions alongside each other, and you are not restricted to the version that your distribution happens to carry which is often outdated. Also, this gives you access to development snapshots