Youtube is a better discovery funnel/tunnel.
Even PayPal offers better payment fees (especially for micropayments).
The only thing I see Patreon offering is a fairly coherent system for managing and communicating with one's "patrons". That's not worth nothing, especially to people without existing website infrastructure already. But it's not worth a lot to people who have that in place.
PayPal offers nothing, afaik, to manage your community or tiered rewards and certainly has no ability to show how much a given creator is receiving. It was clearly never designed for recurring payments and when I've used it for those it seems like it was only grudgingly implemented.
None of these other systems have a good experience for the person, like myself, who donates to a large number different people. On Patreon I can easily view and manage all my contributions in one place. Becoming a patron for a new creator is seamless.
Despite my love for the platform though, them doing investment rounds seems bizarre to me. They've got a good thing going, and I'm not sure that dramatically increasing profitability requirements is a good thing.
I mentioned YT as a discovery mechanism, I wasn't implying anything about it as a revenue mechanism. I probably haven't thought it carefully enough, given that I don't really need the discovery mechanism to support my own work.
PayPal's micropayment service is MUCH better than Patreon's. (or anyone else's as far as I can tell). I make most of my income via PayPal, and the majority of the payments are US$1. PayPal's micropayment fee structure saves me 22c per $1 transaction. That's a huge impact for me (possibly as much as US$2k per month). The only way I could feasibly move away from PayPal is to somehow force/convince most of the people who support my software development work to pay more than US$12 (the point at which regular fee structures start to be better). That would mean convincing roughly 4500 people ("patrons" :) to switch payment platforms too.