The legal options have improved, but the illegal ones are still there and just as good.
Whether it is the real pirate bay or not doesn’t matter, you could never trust TPB.
You can't trust TPB because the content is user generated, TPB does not do much to stop people from uploading malicious content and boosting it to top10 by seeding with bots.
Pirating content has gotten SO easy that my elderly parents do it regularly by simply searching for streams of movies they want to see on google. DRM has stopped none of this - and the risks of getting drive-by malware are an afterthought to most people.
This is dangerous, because I'm not sure the people buying them understand that the content is pirated...
If Netflix captures the market of people who aren't comfortable subverting encryption, they win. 100% capture is unnecessary if they get the people who can't and intimidate the people who won't with the occasional prosecution of the people who do.
The illegal ones are not "just as good" - they faced the competition and got better in the past few years, learning from others successes.
Remember the Popcorn Time. It dropped a bomb because it was an evolution from "go to some tracker, find what you want, download it, wait, watch when it's done" to the modern standards of "think of a title, grab the popcorn and start watching".
(Just in case - I'm not approving or condemning of anything. Just stating the facts what had happened.)