They say that for legal reasons, but their actions are different. If you look at the actual Wolfire complaint, they say they were pressured regardless of steam keys.

I would absolutely agree if it were limited to steam keys, but it's not. Steam can deprioritize your game in more ways than one. Even just not putting your AAA quality $60 game in the featured games list is a big deal.

If you all just give them a pass, they'll keep doing this. If they get criticism for it, they'll likely sweep it under the rug and pretend it was just the Steam key thing the whole time. In the second case, you should expect to see games beginning to sell on Epic (or on their own site) at a lower price than on Steam. There's a reason you don't see this now, and it's not because of steam keys.