I mainly use Grayjay, and I did pay because I believe that if I use a product and you ask for payment, I will pay. The only thing that I have found lacking is the lack of a good autoplay feature. I don't use autoplay most of the time, but it makes driving easier, as well as finding new content/creators. Rotate is weird, I have a few bugs there as well.
However, I still think the point stands that it is difficult to find content creators because there are a thousand instances and no real way to parse the creators in a reasonable way, in order to find new content. You can find instances, but that is the long way. There needs to be a way to parse what is on the peertube part of the fediverse easily before it is going to be remotely appealing/usable to anyone outside our very niche, very nerdy circle.
On mastodon, for example, I can search for a hashtag and it will search the entirety of those servers federated with my home server for that hashtag. Do that with peertube, and its the best option for users, IMHO. Monetization will have to get worked out to attract creators.
Grayjay, though, great app with some room to improve. Already better than NewPipe in some ways.