I understand your point about box-ticking, but we should remember that box-ticking from previous eras (ie. Only basically DWM novels were worth reading and adding to the pantheon) meant ideas about what made “Good Fiction” became embedded around a very particular framework.
For instance, I think Cormac McC is a dreadful writer, but it’s seen as a cultural truth that his hyper-focus on masculinity and all its violence and sorrows is brilliant and incisive, and his writing sharp and wise. I think he’s a pub bore who wouldn’t notice the women actually keeping the world functioning if his life depended on it, so his writing always seems very two-dimensional to me. Same, to a slightly lesser extent, with John Updike.
It’s not box-ticking to notice the gaps, and even Bloom would, if you forced him to read the works name-blind and made him care about the female half of the population, admit that Rebecca West, Dodie Smith, Hilary Mantel, Rosamund Lehmann, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Sylvia Plath, Barbara Comyns, Anne Tyler, Octavia Butler, Patricia Highsmith, Meg Wolitzer, Daphne du Maurier and Sylvia Townsend Warner write with staggering intelligence, wit, observation, truth, subtlety, and beauty.
I love a lot of books on your friend’s list, but to defend them with Harold Bloom’s very one-note view of the world only limits the possibility of discoveries you may make beyond those classic “Great Fiction” lists.