You just need a non-profit behind (or a government) and it should work just fine, they are exempted from the fees.
The ruling is mostly there to prevent google and meta from creating alt stores (which is a benefit to us).
Who’s going to curate that?
Take a look please: https://f-droid.org/en/about/
All I want is a F-Droid-esque store with sane apps. You know, open source apps, centrally built. No in-app-purchases and Chinese geotracking framework for something that is 25 lines of code to talk to some bluetooth gadget.