It's a really good idea, if anything can truly make Google think twice about implementing this, it's them losing apps from their store that the community loves and might jump ship to F-Droid in order to install.

It's obvious that they don't give a damn about software distribution freedom, it's specifically what they want to kill by doing this, so words alone will never be enough.

I hope this gains traction soon

An insufficiently large list of pledgers might be viewed as evidence that there isn't much opposition to the program, when in fact the opposition is overwhelming. In think such a list would need to be assembled without being published at first, and then only once it achieves a certain threshold (both in number of developers, as well as the number of notable apps that would leave the store) would it be publicized.

Godspeed if they can pull this off

Ahh fuck Google. They will allow you to delist apps, but you can never delete them from the Play Store entirely.