Most torrent sites do seem to have an own code base. It's not like they run the same software (or at least they have different themes, I never actually checked).
It is also neither surprising nor bad that the sites still have the same goals/design basics. They all solve the same problem, so they will end up looking similar overall. No problem with that.
What is being criticized here (by me, I don't wanna put words into Warg's mouth since it's an old, probably misremembered interview) is that the way that they deliver that "product" (in this context: the torrent website itself, not the hosted torrents' contents!) in an unimaginative way without taking into account the changing battlefield.
Fully i2p torrent sites? Niche.
Local DHT scraping with an overlay net of torrent index exchange à la yacy or magnetico? Niche.
And apparently: hosting anywhere that is not immediately susceptible to direct US influence, i.e. NOT on namecheap+cloudflare? Still kind of niche. Wtf?
