People don't like web apps and don't know how to install PWA's (by design of the OS manufacturers that make money from developers needing to pay to be on their hosted platforms). Like it or not, if you tell someone you have a product to use on their phone, they're going to want it to be in the App Store.
Web apps should be able to be listed in the app stores. I understand why people want to find things in the store. Younger generations don't really use the internet the way us old farts did. Discovery is no longer something that SEO and ad driven search makes organic any more, so discovery is nearly impossible. Instead of Yahoo style search of webpages, we have the curated search of apps via stores. Not that the app search is amazing, but it's still a smaller subsection than all of the internet which makes it easier.