Yep I agree with you man. itch.io is the deviantart of games. There are some gems, but it's too hard to find them among all the junk.
And it doesn't help that the site is personally curated by staff, so your game won't even have a chance to be featured unless it happens to coincide with their agenda, whatever that may be.
I still think Steam is the gold standard for discovery and distribution, even for indies. For whatever reason, they actually want to help you put your game in front of players. It's not just that Steam has more users; it's that the Steam platform has better discoverability functionality that will actually display your game to people, in an unbiased/non-curated way if it aligns with the player's interests and triggers the site algorithm.
I'm not complaining (much) about itch.io but I think it has a lot of room for improvement in that regard. It's a pain in the butt looking for a fun game to play but only ever seeing streamerbait horror games on the "top rated" or "most popular" tabs, and for the featured games, only ever seeing the games that the staff of this site enjoys.