There where plenty of other engines which where free or had very small licensing fees before UE4/Unity/CryEngine5 and you could do games with them just fine. Heck even nowadays there are plenty of successful games made with all kind of engines. Just 7 years ago you had to code your own rendering pipeline to have deferred rendering as it wasn’t a norm for most of the engines, I don’t have to do anything like that in UE4. You had to create all those tools which you have an easy access today, for free, yes it makes it easy. Making great games is not but making playable game that looks decent was never easier than nowadays.
I think you have a misconception of what Indie market is. Self-publishing studio of 100 people is an Indie company. Self publishing one man band can be an Indie company too. The key here is “self publishing” instead of “this is my first game”. Indie market was not created by someone on purpose to remove fees, it was simply a natural process where ability to sell games conveniently online outgrow necessity to sell games in physical shops. This is all to it. Getting your game Greenlit on Steam doesn’t make you an Indie, what makes you Indie is making game professionally for years without a publisher. Obviously if you can’t sell enough products to pay fees, taxes, salary and etc. you are not an Indie, you are just trying.