I have a good understanding of the deindexing situation, but I’ve also never really cared about Itch driving traffic, at least for this particular title. It’s simply a convenient place for me to set up a storefront-like page where I can post blogs and update files without making a mess of things. I still post links to whatever major updates I make to other sites, particularly Weight Gaming.
I’ll admit that about half my traffic here comes from tag browsing, but overall the biggest single driver is still the Weight Gaming thread, and the rest is either external search engines. clicks back to the main page from people who landed on a blog post or my profile, or Itch collections, none of which are affected by the deindexing, though I’ll admit it does make it a bit harder for people to find it and add to their collection in the first place.
If this were something I cared about monetizing I’d be a little more sensitive about how traffic was being generated, but even then I’d still likely post on Weight Gaming, or start making use of the idle social media accounts I’ve got set up.