We can thank the numerous reaction youtubers who popularise horror games with the teen/preteen market.
Even without the theme of horror, this market drastically changes the nature of how a game is interpreted. Take Minecraft for example*.
I'm not sure if anyone else here has played the Narrow One; but it too is plagued with its own issues. All-in-all, the main issue is that there are very different types of people visiting itch. Keeping the front page needs to cater to the kinds of gamer who doesn't want to explore for themselves. Such people are mostly underage kids. We know itch to have so much diversity and creativity. And you are correct in pointing out that an intial impact sets the tone for all but the most adventurous.
But the subsumation of the existing main page into an alternative user experience would result in rage for the current users for whom the popular offerings appeal to. A bigger question can be for where itch gets the most value. Of the current users being catered to, are they more likely to spend more overall than the average user? Is there another meaningful metric we can look at instead?
*: A novel sandbox. Appealing in it's ease of controlling space. Of use to those who had an interest in architectural aesthetic. Then it gained increasing popularity in gamified form. The ability to be used as an intellectual tool never changed. However the ability to hold serious discussion on subjects like adjacency and negative space, with Minecraft as the medium, became cheapened somewhat. You'd have to move into specialised forums than be a conversation in situ as part of the medium.