So here's what I think I know, and my information is kind of old, and the pandemic happened, and I wasn't directly involved myself, so I might be misremembering.

But as I understand it it goes something like this:

Patreon has the affordance of allowing creators to establish "tiers", where the creator associates certain dollar amounts of pledges with certain package deals they put together. Patreon has – had – has – an API that creators can have their own software query, so that the creator's other systems can tell in real time whether one of their users is a paid up patron over on Patreon, and if so at what tier level.

They were creators whose entire business models were based on this. I gather there were also a third party integrations, companies that actually developed against the Patreon API so that their own services could be integrated with creators' campaigns on Patreon – that is to say there were companies that made products that they sold to creators, that relied on the API.

Well Patreon decided that they're not supporting the API anymore. Apparently, from the screaming on the (now long defunct) creator forums, for a while there it looked like Patreon was going to turn it off. The Patreon walked that back and said that they wouldn't turn the API off, but they wouldn't be supporting it anymore, and they wouldn't be doing any further development on it.

So in a really important sense, these creators (and these companies that had third party integrations) were (are) using Patreon.com as an identity server. But not just an identity server. It doesn't just serve the identity of patrons, but their status as patrons. That's part of what makes it "audience relationship management".

If your supposed Patreon competitor does not support doing that, well, you're certainly not going to seduce all of the creators clinging to the sinking wreck of Patreon's API into abandoning ship on your account, are you?