I guess it depends on how picky you are and what type of content you watch, free streaming services usually have pretty low bitrate and their catalog is far from exhaustive. If you want to watch the latest disney on a phone or laptop it does the job though

Their catalogs are more than exhaustive. I watch a lot of foreign films, bollywood, Thai/Korean movies, etc. I have no idea where I'd get some of them legally. The vast majority of content will hit pirate sites within a day of dropping legally, if it's popular content it will be within an hour usually.

If it’s just you watching on your laptop, true. Add family and a decent home theater and there are reasons to set up Jellyfin and use torrents.

Sure if you want a unknown quality stream with extra ads and malware loading down the website.

Who is paying for that bandwdith? (It's you)

Not that I have done it, but I've heard that usually the first results from yandex torrents are from reputable sites or forums that are quite known to the pirate community. At least regarding torrent, I haven't heard much about streams

What you describe also matches the legal video services

We're literally commenting on a article about how Netflix will inject Ai ads lol. And besides that if you're pirating content I assume you don't have any moral qualms about using a ad blocker. Bandwidth is also basically free?

I’ve never had a reason to visit Yandex but this sounds like one. Thanks for the tip.