It's likely that this decision is consistent with Title 3 regulations of the Patriot Act (which, after the Patriot Act was not renewed, was shuffled into some other legislation). "Sex work" sites are open vectors to sex trafficking and the reason why Backpage (owned by Carl Ferrer, now arrested) was shut down was due to its inability/unwillingness to stop it. Whenever you have a site that opens its doors to strippers "trying to make their way through college", it also opens it to cartels trafficking underage girls. There were parents of sex trafficking victims begging Backpage to help them find their daughter or at least remove the ads from their site to hurt their daughter's pimp's business but they refused.
Pornhub (owned by MindGeek / Bernard Bergmair) had the same issue with revenge porn and child pornography. Even with its partnership with Microsoft to use AI to filter out CSAM, it had to make the decision to completely block user uploads and require verified accounts to post.
The story that they cannot acquire funding might be true in some part but I think that's actually because they're getting in trouble with sex trafficking again. There is a known history of underage girls doing porn on OnlyFans and then them having to eat shit for it. Simply put, this is criminal. The US puts the burden of verifying the age and consent of women heavily on the pornographer and with any open online platform this presents an enormous challenge.
OnlyFans's owner (British son of a British Barclay's banker) likely made the decision that it's better to dump the legal problems, slash the business down 90%, and see if they can compete with Patreon using their existing brand recognition, rather than fight the system, risk criminal charges, and then lose the business entirely anyways like Backpage did.
