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It makes it so if an image host goes down you still have copies on other hosts. By reducing costs you reduce the chance of the site admin walking away. (you wouldn't believe what cats spends on catbox in a month). This has been the story of 90% of hosts we saw on old voat. Do you guys remember slimgur? 90% of the pomfs are gone. Catbox has been shaky sometimes. A wrapper means you can keep a lot of images redundant over multiple services and completely swap out a host as the primary for many images if a host has been down for a few days, thus repairing thousands of old images.

Like go to searchvoat and try to get old lotr memes. It's gone.

Now I worked with picman on pic8 for a while but quit. The reason is someone was targetting pic8 for illegal images and then using it as hosting for their scam site and that was getting redirected to sub-hosts. It was hard to moderate because it was only two people's eyes a very many images. 9,999 images in 10,000 would be 100% ok so it was very hard to look through the 9,999 memes to find one problem. But it needed to be found.

So I decided pic8 offered something useful but had an unrealistic management model so I though I'd make img.gvid.tv that makes all the images public so someone can't hide their shit on my server thinking no one will notice. Mine also doesn't propagate an image to other hosts until the image has lived on my server for a while so I'm not just blindly pushing an unvetted image onto someone else's server blindly, like pic8 does.

Now the last thing to address is you said "what purpose can it have except observe traffic?" I hope I explained there is an actual benefit, but I'd also point out that question actually applies more to standard hosts. It costs me and or picman (who both run different multi-hosts) nothing to run these sites. What purpose is there for the operator of catbox or pomf to spend $9,000 a month to host content the expensive way? Why are they willing to spend that money? If anyone is going to have an ulterior motive it's them.

I don't assume that of them but I do think it's funny that we'd ask a why of one and not why of another? When in one case one is free to run and solves an interesting problem that was interesting to program (the real motive), and the other costs $9,000 a month and does the same thing a hundred existing services already do. Why would anyone write the code, and two why would anyone leave the code running with that kind of bill and no ads running? At some point a hobbiest would turn it off. That's why multi-hosts make sense. Because in a rational world eventually the hobbiest turns it off. Might as well have a cheap service that has a second copy in a database and can re-replicate it to secondary hosts once one goes down. Then we can use hobbiest websites instead of large corporations. And the hobbiests can shut down their sites when they want and we still have useful links.

What purpose? A common interface to the other image hosts, and redundancy by uploading to multiple hosts.