Webtorrent isn't distributed, so you'd just shift the problem to the tracker/signalling server. And in this particular case even BitTorrent proper may not have

Webtorrent isn't distributed, so you'd just shift the problem to the tracker/signalling server. And in this particular case even BitTorrent proper may not have helped because steady-state BT is distributed but if a client doesn't persist its state after a bootstrap - and lack of persistence is the issue here - it'd hit the bootstrap server every time. Granted, it'd only be about one UDP packet per client, much less traffic than what is easylist is seeing, but foolish code deployed at scale can still overload services provided on a budget.