Just cause a game goes on Gamepass =/= trash. Fact of the matter is given the low sales of particular publishers on the Xbox platform and of particular genres, getting the guaranteed money from MS > selling on that platform. Double edge sword obviously, but if you go by median sales expectation, and not delude yourself with a potential pie in the sky lottery, you stand a good chance of recouping a lot of dev cost, and make money on Sony's platform and PC. Obviously this is unfair to Sony's platform consumers who in essence fund these devs at full price but that's something Sony has to figure out - that is, how to throw their weight around to fuck with Gamepass Day 1s. The bigger the market share, the greater the weight. It's a top management question of exercising leverage over developers with some sort of publishing req (that is detrimental to Gamepass) for the luxury of releasing on PS. Obviously the decision so far has been to manage it, only apply clauses to exclusives, and offer a competitive service but there are other, more hardline approaches. Like: requiring all titles published on the platform can not go day 1 on a competitive subscription service for the first 7 days (or X time frame) since launch. Loopholes aplenty, but there are ways to legalese those as well... if devs somehow try to skirt around with different "editions" of the same game.
