oh perhaps you're right. i thought they were clones, not alternative domains. i had that captcha issue as well, it disappeared through no action of my own. hope the same for you.
No there are services that provide global cdn access to torrents. Your provider sees https traffic from your closest cdn edge. You don't share back at any point. These things are a couple of steps more to setup than getting a Netflix subscription and work almost an any device.
They are making money out of this. Subscription is like a month's Netflix for a year's access to everything. Multiple "providers" offering this which means there is money to be made.
I don't think I said anything about trust. I was talking about content delivery. All the things you mentioned before are avoided using this method of delivery.
So you’ve audited the code of these apps, apps published by active criminals, and confirmed in a via reproducible build that none of these apps are a vector for VPN access, nor try to take advantage of vulnerabilities in any of the other software installed on that system.