Respecting indie development means valuing the time and care people put into learning art, code, and design. Calling button-click AI (or human) spam "slop" is not about insulting others; on the contrary, it is about respecting genuine creators and protecting their work from being buried.
I think you are completely missing my point.
A developer spending time and care learning to code, draw, or design (regardless of how rough the final result might be) is putting in genuine creative effort, and that deserves respect.
Mass-producing low-effort slop, whether it is generated by an AI or by a human throwing together zero-effort template flips and asset dumps in 5 minutes just to clog the feed, is not effort. It is spam.
Claiming that every single item uploaded to a completely uncurated public open index represents "effort" is simply ignoring reality. Anyone can check the latest releases right now to see the endless stream of zero (or near-zero) effort products, a massive expanse of shovelware clogging the feed.
I don't think I need to post individual links to prove that water is wet. Denying that spam exists on Itch doesn't make it disappear; it just demonstrates a complete refusal to acknowledge the current state of the platform and, frankly, I am curious why you feel so personally addressed by all this, though I haven't even looked at your profile yet.