Thanks for the detail, as we know people exaggerate on social media and it wasn't clear from the few posts I could find about it whether this was an opt-in or not.
The first post has a mention further down in the tweet thread about that particular creator also getting a ~$3000.00 invoice from Vimeo.
https://twitter.com/hate5six/status/1481511608979533826?s=21
Patreon needs to be a publisher or be a payment processor, but don't charge people for both while only actually doing one or the other.
I suspect a lot of content people have paid for is going to start disappearing next week, it seems that these guys got one-week notices to pay up to Vimeo.
It will be interesting to see what Patreon does then, because your analysis is mistaken in that their hands are not clean here. All the EULAs in the world don't absolve them from charging for a service and then failing to deliver it. By refusing to publish the videos themselves, if Vimeo pulls any of the content down Patreon has opened themselves up for a class action, I would think. The end user subscriber does not have a reason to care about Patreon's subcontracting status, all they would need to know is they paid for content and it did not arrive.
