I find it curious hoe many big corpos maintain .onion services such as reddit and meta (with facebook)
Also, many nodes pass through countries such as the US, UK, DEU, NL and so on.
My rule of thumb is that if something is allowed to operate and exist in the imperial core that goes a bit counterintuitive to bourgeois class goals (specially today with surveillance) then it must have another purpose not easily discovered by the public.
The most plausible theory is that they don’t maintain it in its entirety because that is impossible* since anyone can join in as a node. But three letter agencies probably host and watch some nodes. I can’t say what the implications of that are since there are so many layers of encryption these days I can’t keep up.
* I say impossible with some caveats. I am not capable enough to understand the source code but seeing how there hasn’t been any scandal around it for the duration of its existence the popular assumptions must be true.