It's baffling to me that they took this angle. Hardware exclusivity I think in general is regarded as a negative (aside from weird tribalism/fanboyism among the more hardcore crowd) - but seeing that and thinking you can do the same thing with a software platform is just ludicrous.
Yes, you can buy exclusivity deals and force users onto your platform - but only for those games. It's trivial for players to bounce back and forth between different platforms when it's just software - you can't trap them just because they had to use it for one game they wanted. I'd be more forgiving if they were using exclusivity as a marketing tool alongside an actual attempt at a competitive platform - but as you've outlined and from what I've seen for myself, the experience is hot garbage.
I'm guessing for most users, the Epic store is just a glorified launcher for a bunch of games they got for free, and one or two exclusive games they couldn't get elsewhere.