If you mean QuickTime as a framework, ffmpeg.
Haven’t tried DeaDBeeF to my knowledge, but it seems vaguely familiar, so maybe I did way back in the day.
I haven’t really used local music much since I started streaming music. I never would have guessed that shift would occur. I’m finding the value in local media lately, though. I know that remote streaming assets can disappear anytime, and now plan for that eventuality. Building a local media library feels sustainable and fun again, and discovery has a companion goal of collecting.
We also fought a lot when it came to the early days of torrenting anime and movies. I don't think Streaming and QuickTime really ever cross paths. It just didn't support as many fancy features that VLC and Media Player with the various Codec packs did, and later on players like MPV absolutely overwhelmed QuickTime in terms of playback and feature sets.
I have vague memories that QuickTime used to come with the iTunes package for Windows, but I may be wrong on this so don't quote me on it. I do distinctly remember a period of time when many people who had Windows would ask how QuickTime got on their system.
From the Mac side of things, QuickTime always felt like it didn't know what it should be. It was aways a sort-of media player without all the library features and playback features the other players had, along with a very basic media editor, media converter/exporter, and a few other bells and whistles that were neat but no one used and very few people wanted to pay for.
Eventually I think Apple just realized there was no sense in maintaining it as a priority. As I wrote this post, I realized that on Big Sur, the dictionary no longer corrects QuickTime like it corrects iTunes or iMac or many other Apple products. (amusingly, apple seems to have had the self restraint not to assume you mean the company and not the fruit when writing apple, just a neat little fact ;))
Ultimately though, I don't think streaming and QuickTime really were enemies at all. I don't think streaming was even really a thing by the time QuickTime was really relegated to "that app you accidentally open movies in sometimes." Now it just is a media player that sticks around because you have to have a media player with your OS or the other OSes will make fun of you.
It did, because QuickTime is/was a media handling framework. The article isn't talking about the QuickTime Player application except incidentally. When you were using the Mac on OS 7 up until about 2011 (with the introduction of AVFoundation), just about everything that was playing media using Carbon or Cocoa API calls was using QuickTime under the hood.
When Apple ported QuickTime Player to Windows, they ported the QuickTime framework, too -- and iTunes for Windows was built to use that. So QTP basically came along for the ride whether you wanted it to or not. I don't know if this is still the case, though.
This would be odd since the video player in the very latest macOS is still called "QuickTime Player" even though QuickTime is no longer involved. Indeed on Monterey it's autocorrecting completely for me
(Also, the current version of the QuickTime Player -- and, of course, AVFoundation -- handles streaming perfectly well, although I doubt many people use QTP for that.)