I’ve been there and done it, gone through both business loans, gone through private investment channels, and I’ve talked to small publishers. Those are all options on the table; a small business loan should be fairly easy to obtain if you can demonstrate why you believe you can succeed - they accept that you might not and this is a risk both you and the loaner accept. Private investment is available for those that can produce a reasonable business plan. Failing that, there are dedicated small publishers who exist solely to prop up these kinds of small indie developers and assist them getting their games to market. Crowdfunding is also always an option. FYI, when I received my loan, I was unemployed and owned no property to speak of, my financial status wasn’t exactly secure - I still got a fairly substantial loan based on my ability to demonstrate confidence in the product and ability to succeed.
None of those (except potentially the loan since it affects your ability to pay the loan back in a failure case) care at all about your current financial status, they care about your ability to succeed.
If you’re finding that none of these options are working for you, it is highly likely you do not have the ability to succeed. At this point in time, rather than looking to blame Valve for erecting an impossible barrier to entry, or other developers being ‘pretentious’ and unwilling to accept rivalry from supposedly more innovative, poorer developers, maybe you should evaluate why you don’t have the ability to succeed and why nobody is willing to invest in you and your business - because I can tell you for free that the answer is that there’s either a problem with your product or your business (or both).
From a related perspective, Steam isn’t a charity, it’s a business - it’s genuinely in Valve’s interest to stock titles that are actually going to sell. From a consumer perspective it helps nobody to have a storefront saturated in products nobody wants to buy.