Hello, I was wondering why the VIPs and Mods endpoint private to just the broadcaster on the Helix API even though you can run /vips and /mods in any channel?
1st party functionality (ie the Twitch site itself), and 3rd party functionality (the Helix API and other services for external devs), do not have parity in capabilities nor is there intended to be for various reasons.
For this example, it’s likely that Twitch doesn’t want 3rd parties to be able to easily scrape the entirety of every channels VIP/Mods list, and while it is possible to do /vips or /mods as you pointed out on the 1st party site you may be violating Twitch’s ToS by attempting to scrape site data that way.
In general, just because something can be done on the Twitch site itself is not a particularly good use case for Twitch making that data available without a scope, so if you have a valid use case for why you need that data without the broadcaster granting you those permissions I recommend submitting a feature request on UserVoice.