But if some are as bad as you say they are, then they’ll get rejected all the same
Oh I don't disagree with you on that.
However, because the barrier to entry is gone, and even financially there's no barrier to getting your work out there, even rejection isn't enough to curtail the slop.
First "self-published" novel got 1 review that literally called it "an atrocity worthy of the Nuremburg trials"? Who cares. Publish that sequel...and the sequel after that. There's literally no incentive to get better and no dis-incentive to prevent it no matter how crap the work might be.
The only real incentive anymore to stop publishing your glorious 12-volumes-and-counting epic story about a space wizard that has never actually sold a single copy is literally self-shame, which, in art circles, is not a common commodity.
So regardless of whether or not they are being read, or purchased, they're still just taking up more and more space. Adding more and more static to the crap that the future is going to have to sift through.
To me, anyway, it has less to do with gate-keeping and more to do with curation.
I admire your optimism about cream rising to the top. But I just can't share it.
The average person isn't going to spend an hour digging through a literal trash-heap on Amazon in order to find something worth their time. They'll give up after five minutes of reading terrible review after terrible review and then go find something else to do with their time.
And thus the collective intelligence of humanity drops; not because they're actually reading all of this white noise of self-published crap. But because they're not reading at all because of the effort it takes to weed through it at the book store (digital or otherwise).
The best example I can give is how "Oprah's Book Club" (am I giving away how damn old I am yet?) got people reading. They read because they didn't have to go and find this stuff themselves. Someone curated it for them, told them "Hey...this is good".
If the average reader didn't have Oprah and had to dig through five thousand Amazon self-published "suggestions" before stumbling onto Toni Morrison or Push by Sapphire, they're quickly go doom scroll Facebook instead.
Like I said, I admire your optimism and a part of me wishes I could share it. But the idea that the lack of any accountability for self-"published" drivel completely muddies any real "discover-ability" of the actual good stuff is a hill that my elitist ass will happily die on.