OK, I have thought about this more and I realized that I have never worked on compute intensive apps like Photopea, so I am truly ignorant here. I also did only SPAs forever, and I am now only learning about SSR and hydration. I guess if there was a truly server-side rendered Photopea, using React something like React Server Components, it would probably not be supportable by free + ads. It might actually cost at least as much a month as the inspiration of the app.

I guess my point was, how can anyone protect any client-side IP in the modern era?