Steam Direct is great for devs and awful for consumers.
The fee is recoupable, which means that if your game sells Valve will give you your money back.
I don’t think the fee will be higher than 1k, they just want to scare those guys submitting joke games.
Unfortunately, as I said on the Steam Community comments, this is not going to stop shovelware publishers because Steam is broken.
Even if your game is total **** you can give 1 million keys away and make money through trading cards.
They should have forced Greenlight candidates to release a playable demo to judge the game but there’s no way back, they just want it to be fully automated.
Steam is not the only online store, you can sell instantly on many other marketplaces, if you’re not willing to make an effort to promote your game it’s not going to sell even if it’s on Steam because it won’t have enough discoverability.
Even if you live in a 3rd world country you can make it happen, just start selling to first world consumers, learn about sales and marketing and promote your game, start building a community NOW.