I never understood this, is there anything that makes it difficult for the original uploader, the one that supposedly offers the file directly, to offer a torrent instead for the same amount of time?

As far as perennity is concerned it seems strictly better.

The biggest problem with BTv1 was the lack of per-file checksumming, and swarm merging (i.e. individual files have shared seeding pools across torrents). BTv2 specs the latter, but I think only BiglyBT actually implements it. Having both of those features from the get-go would've gone a LONG way to fixing the dead torrent problem.

You only need one person/organization to commit to seeding. The majority of people do not want to seed at all without some sort of incentive.

If this site represents a coordinated datahoarding effort then there will be at least a few people who will seed indefinitely.

A torrent with a webseed is strictly more resilient than a direct download link alone.

I always wondered why v2 is never used... you can even search for files by their individual hash with it.