So it turns out decentralized multi routed is not a good solution for video streaming.

Works amazingly well for watching something front to back if your download speed is fast enough; you'd never know it wasn't being streamed. The hardest part is finding a good torrent for what you want to watch. Ironically the Netflix catalog is one of the most easily available to pirate since people rip it directly from web.

And I'm not sure most people actually care if their home hardware is being used for whatever by the service they're using, or else there'd be pushback on electron apps from more than just HN.

The sense I always got from Netflix's P2P work was that it was heavily tied into the political battles wrt the BS arguments that Netflix should pay for peering with tier 2 ISPs. Did this work there continue much after that problem went quieter?

Good quality, barely any buffering.

The niche content may be too difficult for a "live" streaming experience.

Strictly speaking, the Internet was supposed to help some servers survive and continue working together despite some others being destroyed by a nuke. That is more-or-less the case today: we see how people use VPNs to route around censorship. Whether you were supposed to stream TikTok videos directly from the phones of their authors or through a centralized data hose - i'm not sure that was ever the grand idea.

Also "decentralized" and "monetize" don't go well together because innovation is stimulated by profit margins and rent-free decentralized solutions by definition have those margins equal to zero (otherwise the solution is not decentralized enough).