Video streaming is not cheap. Petabytes and petabytes of data transferred, stored, streaming, networked, etc., etc. YouTube is already barely profitable and only from pissing off their audience and streamers.
A comparison to Patreon isn’t fair at all because they have almost no infrastructure to speak of. What do they actually do? Host a web site with some forum software on it? Handle subscriptions and emails, with a light bit of payment handling? Really?
Have you seen PeerTube? It’s a good attempt, but even with the P2P-style sharing, they are experiencing 100x the problems that Lemmy has here because of the sheer amount of bandwidth and storage they have to deal with from a tiny micro-fraction of a percentage of the content that YouTube or OnlyFans serves.
Right now, large corporations are the only ones with the resources to even attempt such a thing, unfortunately.