Avoiding escrow isn’t really possible unless you somehow live in a perfect world without bad actors. I recommend doing some digging into how different defunct darknet markets have utilized escrows and monero as even if your market does everything legally there’s still valuable leasons to learn. If you want recommendations you should look into White house market (mods it’s defunct) as their system handled escrow in a way where everything happened at the transaction level meaning the only coins that could be stolen were the exact transaction ammount.

Silk road is long gone but there are a plethora of other similar markets. Just like any other service in demand when one gets shutdown three more pop up in it’s place.