A DM system with access attained through community milestones might help. Perhaps one could play an official itch video game to achieve DM activation.
But why should it be a reward system ? Dm is a normal feature on a forum....why do you think itch does not support it ?
Their explanation is that there already exist many messaging systems to compete with: e-mail, Discord, XMPP, Matrix, etc.
Everyone who has an Itch account has an e-mail address, anyway.
If there were not a verification process, inbox spam might be rampant.
