Evidence does appear to point to you being right, but I really wonder just who is going to these lengths to pirate things for other people?
A significant investment of time and money, from highly a highly skilled individual, for... bragging rights? Is there some financial motive I'm unaware of?
Content owners really seem to underestimate how far people are willing to go for kudos alone on setup cost if the reproduction cost is zero.
Also for some people it's a point of philosophy / concern about future-proofing. Guy I knew back in the day was the biggest torrenter around... He was stuffing a hard drive full of '80s cartoons. His attitude on it was that the creators and owners did not care if those half-hour toy commercials would be around in 100 years, but he did.
Looking at video games today, riddled with DRM reliant on the server infrastructure of a finite life company makes me sad.
As other people already said, some people do it purely "for the just cause". But the piracy is also a literal gold mine if you're able to manage legal risks. Basically, you take ripped content and either re-sell ad-free access worldwide (Netflix is really, really limited to the first world), or make it available for free with heavy ads, or both.
I know this was the incentive behind a lot of the people financially supporting the warez scene in the past.
The people breaking the systems and the people doing most of the pirating are different.
DRM breaking is a fun challange to some people. You can find these kinds of people breaking all sorts of things. Browser sandbox escapes, remote code execution etc. The mindset is well described in the article here as I can only solve a problem if somebody else implies that I can't. It's a fun challenge! Plus if you do it before others, you get to feel really superior.
The actual pirating is however done by different people. Usually initially by close acquaintances of the DRM breaker, but the methods tend to spread/leak.
Precisely the opposite. We do it for free because other people do it for money.