These experience degradation pushes people gradually towards a cliff.

Another competing thing comes up in people's life (it need not be even in the same category), the previous one would be dropped if there are unpleasant association with it - conscious or subconscious.

OR, ..need to cut back (finance, digital wellbeing, etc.), again the first thing would go out is the one which is associated with less value i.e., of lesser quality, not living upto expectation, and so on..

You would still buy the burger even if it has a few fewer sesame seeds, would you? ... until there are just three artfully placed seeds on each bun and nobody buys any?

No, but they might pirate (but I bet yify is even worse)

On the contrary, the pirated media I've seen has been by far the highest-quality. It doesn't have to be delivered live, so encoding can be more efficient, and the source is almost always a 4k blu-ray or whatever else is the best that can be bought. In many cases it's even better than playing it through a DVD player because your computer uses better codecs.

Netflix (and most of Youtube) is offline encoded.

I believe the limitation being referred to is that they're bandwidth-constrained -- encoding for streaming needs to strongly favor size over quality.

Netflix needs a movie to be 500MB whereas torrents can happily be 2-8GB

Or 50GB, for some torrents 4K torrents.

I've heard from Netflix people that they re-encode their entire library every month. They are continually improving their encoding and storage tools so the streaming bandwidth/quality savings dwarfs the costs of re-encoding.

Is it really easy to find high quality pirated content?

I've got the impression that highly-compressed content is often so popular that bigger/higher quality files are hard to find.

As someone who occasionally downloads unlicensed content, I find that most movies (and occasionally high profile TV shows or those with a focus on visuals--like BBC's nature docs) are available in multiple qualities.

There are the basic 300-700mb copies for people who just want to watch something and don't have the time or bandwidth to bother with amazing quality (these look like your typical compressed cable or "tube" stream).

Then there are the 720/1080 versions which are still pretty compressed but at least encoded with decent settings and at a resolution that doesn't look bad on an average TV. Often these are "webrips" where someone capped the stream from Amazon or whatever online streaming rental service had the movie.

And last are the massive bluray rips that can go over 50GB in size and include 10bit HDR video, Dolby Atmos, etc. I never bother with these because honestly, if I'm pirating a movie/show it's because I'm not sure I'll enjoy it or it's just not available for me to watch yet. The movies I would want in maximum quality are the ones I would be buying anyway.

I'm sure plenty of people can't or won't buy the official blurays so these are the alternative, but for me, "bootleg" copies are the equivalent of "I'd watch it if it was on TV" but not a replacement for stuff I'm really invested in seeing at max quality because I love it.

Amazon's 1080p copies are usually very good quality, certainly comparable to the bluray release. Pirates have been able to download and strip DRM from there and itunes, etc. for a long time, no capturing+re-encoding necessary.

(Throwaway account)

Depends on the content but if it’s something remotely popular, and was released on BluRay, the answer is yes. The most popular torrent at the moment apparently 1.92GB BluRay rip of Joker (2019), with 8k seeders.

There’re 2 higher-quality versions found on the Internets, 6GB and 16GB. Both have 4k video encoded in 10-bit h265, have 5.1 / 7.1 audio, the former one has 1k seeders, the latter 100. These numbers are very approximate, I haven’t downloaded nor watched that movie. But usually, even 100 seeders is enough to saturate my 120 mbit/sec download link.

YMMV.

This is much harder than simply opening the netflix app built into your TV.

I'm bothered by the netflix quality every time I use it, but the hassle to download the movie before hand, connect my laptop to the HDMI, need to get up to control it, need to get up to move the mouse to make it disappear, etc. makes it a non-option. Sure there are solutions to those problems, but they're also work.

What makes you think it’s worse exactly?