Right, except that decentralization is also the solution to fast data delivery -- CDNs work by decentralizing data, and if the people who built this were smart, they'd work in a way where users could get discounts for helping to spread/rehost paid streams (for a discount to their sub fee, for example), or choose to help a streamer out by replicating their stream for free.

I personally think you could find a lot of people who would be willing to help CDN/share/host for streamers they support, a nice step between watch for free and upvote/like and send the streamer money.

Even if you didn't want to go the P2P route, there's no reason that streamlabs can't step in to help provide that infrastructure if it's cost effective (i.e. if the streamer is paying) -- surely a streamer is going to be willing to drop $50 on extra resources for a stream if they think it's going to bring them >$50 worth of recognition/good content for their streamers. Streamlabs wouldn't even have to keep these resources on hand, they could spin them up on demand and just charge a slight premium. Even better, streamlabs could give streamers easy tools to enable purchasing cloud resources for better stream quality, and charge them for the convenience (and let them know of course that they pay the AWS bills at the end of the day).