Fresh data for 2024 reveals that while overall pirate site traffic dipped to 216 billion visits, the landscape is shifting dramatically. Publishing piracy is booming, largely driven by an insatiable global demand for manga. In stark contrast, both music and film piracy have tanked. Despite these changes, the United States remains the top traffic source for pirate sites.
I don’t think they are “so bad”, it’s really just the big American blockbuster market that has declined significantly. It seems to be a common occurrence across all sorts of mediums that people confuse a decline in the quality of the mass market stuff with a decline in the medium as a whole. Additionally, there’s always a bias that occurs with these comparisons because people are often comparing the slop from a brief period of recent history with the greatest hits from the entirety of recorded human history.