That's for the normal consumer level stuff. Of course, if you have the time and will, you can do what I have done and go down the rabbit hole of DIY speakers and subs to end up with something that blows the socks off of actual THX cinemas--highly recommended ;)
I guess lack of choice makes choosing easy—you only have one option and that's it, take it or leave it. Having to choose between vastly different options is also easy. But if you have a hundred similar, yet slightly different options to choose from, making the decision becomes psychologically hard, even if it doesn't make a difference for your UX which option you choose.
Just to add a thought: big film studios screw over the VFX artists all the time. There are stories of a movie winning "Best Visual Effects" award and the VFX house that actually did all the hard work going bankrupt because they didn't get paid enough by the big studio to make ends meet. IIRC, Life of Pi was one such occasion. Isn't that piracy, too: owner class stealing labor from working class.
One could possibly argue that piracy is the inevitable product—nay, an honoured practice—of capitalism because it all boils down to exploiting someone's labor for your own benefit without fair compensation for the laborer. Big corporations exploit 3rd world countries to get their resources for as cheap as possible; pirates exploit movie, film and game studios to get their entertainment for as cheap as possible. Circle of life; business as usual🙃
Navidrome is a self-hosted music streaming service and Tailscale is an easy to use VPN to remotely access your home (or work) network and services on them without exposing anything on the public internet.
Never really stopped, what with being a low income resident in eastern parts of EU.
But a big reason in addition to cost and many services or content simply not being available in my country is all the technical loops you have to jump through to get the best experience—I remember the time when to get full HD streaming you had to either use a specific set-top box or certain Intel CPU-s integrated graphics in a specific browser. If you didn't, you'd be limited to 480p. The same still goes for 4k and Atmos today.
Speaking of Atmos, ironically being a DIY audio enthusiast has pretty much locked me out of that. No way to decode Atmos on a PC, you have to use an AVR. But my speakers use (along with other uncommon components) digital crossovers that take digital inputs and multichannel digital outputs are verboten on AVR-s because MPAA and licensing terms (I believe only the 30000€+ Trinnov and Storm Audio pre-pros have them). Not to mention that even 3000€+ AVR-s have DAC performance no better than my 50€ Asus sound card. In the end, it's just not worth the cost and hassle of setup.
For me, convenience of streaming is also a non-argument; with Jellyfin, Navidrome and Tailscale I can access my whole library from any point on Earth that has internet access. And streaming quality is only limited by the internet connection quality, not by my hardware not having some obscure DRM feature.