Unrelated aside: This might be the most creatively concise form of critical communication to a comment I’ve ever seen on HN. Nice job.

This is HN. I expect a technical audience who want technical solutions.

I'm a full time DevOps engineer and would consider myself highly technical. I'd never do what you described because looking at the list of steps gave me a headache.

My solution: Download torrents, SCP them to my Plex box, done.

The article seems to be talking about consumers in general, not consumers who read HN.

I’m on HN taking to HN users. I’m sure the same article is on r/torrents with less useful comments.

You are replying to the main article, not an individual user. Therefore, in context, your question "Why are people still using file sharing and torrents?" is asking that of the people referenced in the article. Context is important.

So because I'm technical, I'm supposed to do all of that?

Maybe I don't want to.

Surely you're not positing that torrents aren't a technical solution. They are an extremely technical solution to many problems people originally faced with Usenet.

My point is the HN audience is more adept than normal people. The Usenet automation and setup requires more technical knowledge than say drag and dropping a torrent file into a torrent program.