I just fundamentally disagree with your view. This site will succeed if it makes money. It will make money from successful projects selling, not from freeware games and jams. Catering to people who are not interested in making their projects good and profitable is a mistake.
You do know that itchio started as a platform to easily distribute freeware and gamejam games and unlike many other digital stores for indiegames that popped up and went under over the years, they are still around?
Sure, I'm not the itchio business person, but from what I can tell, having a good portion of your userbase being composed of smaller amateur devs doesn't really seem to hurt them...
Well, I mean you can disagree with my worldview as much as you like! I've been doing this for nearly twenty years now and it's largely been my experience that big Indies don't compete with each other (sharing info to lift each other up is the norm where I lurk), more co-exist. I've sold hundreds of thousands of games in all these years and never once needed to push anyone out to do so. I can't possibly see what advantage doing so would net me over what I already can do, y'know?
So sure, you can disagree but a) it's not how things tend to work in games and b) it's a moot point because Itch is and will continue to be somewhere that welcomes all (within the bounds of its code of conduct) -- we're just trying to ascertain the best route to ensuring both free and paid can thrive.
*Shrugs*
I'm also not interested in "pushing people out", in fact, for the first game I made now I wrote an entire tutorial on how to program that game from scratch, which you can see here https://github.com/SSYGEN/blog/issues/30. This is more work than most people do to help their fellow indie developers. What I find wrong and misguided is that I should have less information available to me because some people can't deal with seeing a number attached to their projects.