How should creators monetise on PeerTube?

Patreon and merchant and whatnot, same as they do on YouTube already. It’s not as if the pittance Google pays is the majority of their income.

(Also, my comment was about random users uploading videos without the creators’ consent, so that’s really a different discussion.)

Also, running a PeerTube instance is likely going to get expensive fast.

It’s built on bittorrent, you know. The more popular a video gets, the less you have to serve it yourself.