Outside of the US, content on Netflix varies from "bad" to "meh".
In Germany Netflix is "meh" but the only half-decent alternative is Amazon Prime, which isn't better at all.
Subtitles are a deal-breaker for me, so I've been sourcing my movies from a local brick-and-stone DVD rental after Netflix clamped down on the VPN and DNS workarounds. Surprisingly the series offering in Netflix is quite OK in this regard though.
Not these "pirates" guys. They seem to have all of the good stuff and some more, so they outcompete Netflix outside the US quite well.
Is Netflix blocking VPNs? Yes. They didn't use to, but they started doing it around a month or so ago. Some VPNs could route around it, some couldn't.
Alternative answer: using a VPN is against Netflix' TOS, so it's not really different from regular piracy. You could argue that you pay for convenience, but you could also argue that if you are going to open yourself to a lawsuit, you might not want to do it with your personal credit card.