Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Not for Youtube at least. They actively try to degrade performance for Ublock Origin users by refreshing elements that force ublock into a death loop that ends with exceedingly high CPU/RAM usage that potentially crashes your browser. At that point, I would say it goes beyond annoyance and into malicious activity.

You have a dedicated community of people who love sticking their fingers in the eyes of giant media conglomerates in their free time vs massive media conglomerates funneling millions of dollars into nullifying that work via DRM, code changes, etc.

Its an uphill battle, but it comes with the territory.

Even though prices are stupid atm, this is your push to finally spin up a local jellyfin instance. You can run this off an old laptop and an external drive. It won't be fantastic but it will work and you can look and giggle at the IP holders wringing their hands not knowing how to actually stop piracy. Hell, my entire docker stack (minus plex) is just on a pi. Starting off it's not too expensive. The expense hits when you turn it into a full blown hobby and you are looking at homelab setups ontop of your htpc setup.

Short answer: yes

Long answer: yeah

It sounds like you are ready to learn about self-hosting your own media and using services like Jellyfin and Navidrome to access your media.

It's been a constantly evolving war for a long time. I used to be able to just copy files from one floppy to another and that's it. Then came some protection and we had to copy the whole disk nibble by nibble.

Any company being pirated will fight back eventually. You just have to keep up and deal with it. Or the alternative is paying money with no guarantee the service will hold up its end of the bargain anyway.

They’re consolidating their marketshare and decreasing cost through every method available to increase revenue. All the avenues of piracy have just become the lowest hanging fruit now that these companies aren’t growing anymore.