At least for media, piracy websites have a more extensive catalogue (of course) but they also have better privacy which is crazy. And they also allow you to use ad blockers. Sites you pay for would still show ads sometimes and don’t even allow VPNs.
At that point there is no point on paying for streaming and if you wanted to support the creators you could do it separetely with merch, other proyects they have or direct donations if any of those are aviable.
Piracy is always better than paying. There is no way for a product that has to pay for content and provide infra + development to be better than something you can get for free and do whatever you want with.
Now, yes. Back in the day? Ehhh maybe not. Early files and torrents were super low quality, maybe had an RSS feed. Hell, the original client was one window with one d/l going. You had to launch another instance to d/l another one. Then Netflix happened and it was like “man, this is pretty cheap and the quality is better than i’m getting online” and the hat went away for a while. Now that we are essentially back to cable, out came the hat.
Yeah but the days your comparing there was no streaming so getting a torrent via RSS was still better than paying $20 for a cd with 15 tracks half of which sucked.