Creators upload videos twice, once for patrons who watch them ad-free and once for people who don’t want to pay. That way, people who don’t have money to spend on YouTube can still enjoy their videos and they get a little kickback. Youtubers don’t need Peertube to release videos ad-free, so it doesn’t really change much if Patreon is more than enough.
Furthermore, the inherent privacy issues with peer to peer video consumption (I can easily track what videos you’ve been watching by simply connecting to the swarm) and the huge hosting costs a moderate sized Youtuber would inflict make the premise rather silly.
I think Peertube is great for small channels and maybe for corporate videos within an intranet, but Peertube can’t afford a moderately popular Youtuber.
With browser extensions and other programs becoming tunnels for AI scrapers, consumer IPs are becoming less and less trustworthy. I receive bots from just about every Brazilian consumer ISP. All it takes is one person on your network with a shitty app/extension installed and your home becomes indistinguishable from a bot farm. It’s extra bad if you’re behind CGNAT so you can’t even influence your IP’s reputation.
Nobody wants these CAPTCHAs, but they’re still pretty effective, even with AI image interpretation. Plus, it still beats remote attestation in terms of Linux friendliness, and that’s the inevitable next step in the war against scrapers.