Your confusion is warranted, the system has twisted incentives. I am a scientist working at a rich university. I still mostly use scihub unless the article is on arxiv, even for articles which have my name in the byline. All this to say, I consider pirating these papers the moral highground and you should not feel bad doing it. Thankfully, I have the job security and funding to demand my work be open access (a whole other can of worms).