There are several Pornhub employees, reading HN, answering questions same happens on Reddit, they are pretty transparent actually.
I don't understand why we need those articles making feel like we are in science fiction. If you want really secret businesses look into dating apps or Google/Facebook ads
Edit: and just to add, imagine how hard is it to run pornhub. Even though watching porn is one of the most common leisure in the world. Nobody want to work with them, nobody want to rent them servers, nobody want to sell them their ads, nobody want to be their payment processor ,... because porn is taboo. So yeah they probably have to find tricky ways to do things. At the end of the day they only make 500m of revenu, which is nothing, Tinder only is making 3-4 times that.