I suspect you know this, but in case it isn’t clear to others: it isn’t that the peertube devs senselessly decided to support some weird incompatible version of bittorrent: the only reason webtorrent exists at all is because it isn’t technically possible to speak the normal bittorrent protocol using the networking primitives available in web browsers today.

As more native torrent clients start to support webtorrent alongside normal bittorrent I suspect webtorrent will relieve a lot more load from peertube etc webservers. I have mixed feelings about this, though, as webtorrent is pretty terrible for privacy: instead of just a website operator knowing who is watching what videos when, now any interested party can learn the IPs of every viewer of a specific video.

Privacy aside, webtorrent also raises an interesting plausible deniability against copyright enforcement. If you get caught torrenting, copyright holders can easily argue that you must’ve been running a torrent client and knew what you were downloading. But now, with web torrent, it is actually possible that any random website you left open could have decided (perhaps some minutes you loaded it) to make your browser into a web torrent peer without your consent or knowledge!

libtorrent, that most clients use, supports both now, tho i’ve had mixed results using it