There is no “you will find a way” thing.
Either there is a so called indie (freelance developers) market or there isn’t.
If they ask anything above $500 to publish a single game Valve would cause Steam to die quickly and only medium and large software houses would be left on Steam.
If Valve doesn’t want to spend money hiring employees to do what Apple does on the App Store to review and approve everything they can’t ask $600 … $1,000 or $5,000 just to submit a game or multiple games.
If Valve asks a $1,000+ fee to publish a game on Steam they must ensure that the game sells no less than 10,000 copies which would mean the developer manages to make money out of it and the $1,000+ fee becomes just a bit more to pay on the 30% fee that Steam gets anyway.
I really hope Valve will set a fee no higher than $200 or $250 per game which would be more than good as long as the fee doesn’t increase anymore once set. They keep getting 30% on sales it is not that setting a $5,000 fee would mean that Valve would give 100% to the publisher.