Well yeah it may just be my perspective, I don’t know how easy it was in ye olde days, since I’m fairly new to pirating and never used a VPN for it (because it isn’t really needed in my country, not because I’m stupid)

The access hasn’t changed much, but I feel like the knowledge got easier to access for a non-pirates.

That’s how it is in Switzerland: you pay a small piracy tax on every storage medium, in return downloading films and series is legal (but not uploading, though I never got a problem with torrenting)