I think there’s a difference between a third-party app/frontend and a modded app like these. One is at least trying to provide their own value, and stuff like NewPipe for example can support multiple services in the same UI, a feature I wish was better supported in streaming as I dislike trying to navigate all the individual apps. Modifying a service’s app to remove the ads while still consuming their bandwidth and not putting in the effort to make your own app feels worse for me for some reason. At least pirates generally tend to use their own bandwidth and servers to distribute things instead of leeching directly off the original.

Hope that helps explain it for at least one person.