If you read HN you might know what sideloading is and how to do it. If you're anyone else and you even get as far as trying it (which isn't likely) you get a big scary warning about how obviously everything sideloaded is a virus and Google won't be able to scan it and you should use the play store (I don't actually know what it says, but the point is that it's a big scary warning).

The point is that sideloading presents several barriers to entry and at every extra step you'll lose a few more users. very few people will get all the way through enabling sideloading, figuring out how to actually do it with ADB or something, ignoring the scary prompts, and get all the way to actually installing and running an app. This is a nice workaround for a few people, not a solution to Google applying their policies in an aggressive way to remove apps they don't like that clearly aren't themselves dedicated to hate speech.