"Science" has institutions to pay for the journal subscriptions. As a random human person my life has changed drastically since the late 2020 India legal case. I used to read a dozen papers a week via sci-hub and now I read maybe a 2-3 and none from the last couple years.

So science marches on but without public access to the full text articles all we have to go on are the usually low quality science journalism press releases.

And research got along just fine without Wikipedia. Yet having a comprehensive, easily accessible and free knowledge base is just so damn convenient.

Yeah, sci-hub is great, but I'm pretty sure academic research would be fine without it... on account of having been a biology PhD student both before and after the advent of sci-hub.

> Science got along fine without sci hub.

Science in the rich countries perhaps, anyway. And if you're at a university.