Keeping low effort apps out of the store helps their bottom line. It's a second order effect.
Apple should long ago make the $99 an App Store fee, not tied to any provisioning certificates or code signing.
Apple's $99 fee is annoying and feels like a waste of time and one more thing to manage.
The paid ADC program has kept me from sharing projects with other developers who would have otherwise been able to contribute (but they aren't paid devs because they'd rather have a year of Costco hotdogs than pay Apple to help me with my app for a week)