There is a contingent of Hacker News that strongly opposes the opening of iOS to third party app distribution, usually with the reasoning that doing so would prevent Apple from strong-arming third party developers into abiding by rules that benefit users (no notification spam, billing for subscriptions must be centrally managed, users must be able to opt out of tracking). If developers have other distribution options on the platform then, if they're successful enough, they'll be able to have their users install their misbehaved (but popular/necessary) app by some channel that Apple doesn't control. Comments where I support opening of the iOS platform are the most consistently downvoted of any that I make, though most do recover to a positive score eventually. There are exceptions, but that is the overall pattern I observe.
Curation is the status quo, the only thing that would change is that people could choose to trust another entity to curate their apps.