Itch had a related feature in the past, the press system. It was abused pretty quickly and ended up dying.
Hey, sorry for the late reply, I wanted more responses to accumulate on this post to see what I thought about it all. So this is interesting, the press system. I assumed one of the ways a Youtuber/Streamer/Dev network would be abused is that devs would thoughtlessly spam the streamers with rubbish. Looking at the page, I'm auessing the abuse of the press system was people making fake Youtube accounts to get free games? What was the abuse?
Also great to see you reply on this post years before on the same topic. Was this post (5 years ago) before the press system?