Patreon is probably a better source of income for them. Until peertube is good enough atleast.

It's because F-droid builds these every week instead of as soon as it is out.

Yeah honestly as far as app repositories go, f-droid's usually pretty good at keeping things up to date. I use it for most apps I can get off there, newpipe's about the only one I bother grabbing straight from the site because I get impatient.

Youtube ads work in a way that domain blocking(pi-hole) cannot block them.