Thanks very much for the answer!
I understand that this is a one-time issue, and there is a good chance my account won't have this problem again in the future. But this is going to keep hurting first-time sellers, so I thought I should propose this change anyway, to help others coming after me.
Measures to protect against abuse are very important, and I appreciate that itch.io has them. I think my proposal is compatible with those measures while giving honest developers better tools to control their release.
That workaround you mentioned wouldn't work for us, or anyone who is careful about PR. You typically ask the press to have embargos on the game coverage to make sure the game becomes public at approximately the same time as the articles. If you publish the game two weeks in advance, there is a good chance that the game will become listed well before the press has published their articles, upsetting them and destroying your relationship with the journalists who trusted you.
An alternative would be to publish the game in advance, but explicitly not make it searchable, and wait for the review to flip the searchable bit. But will you be notified when the review is complete? Otherwise, you don't know when you can start marketing push and flip the searchable bit. And will it even be reviewed if we don't mark it as searchable?
The best way to avoid race conditions is to give the developer some control over the review process. At the very least, information about when it's complete, but ideally also a way to manually trigger the review before the game is released.