I'm not sure about where you are but in Holland everyone was downloading movies and TV shows in the early 2000s. When Netflix came to Europe that changed though I do expect it to go back to that now that the content has been spread over tens of platforms with every rising prices and annoying ads.
2. I am in the U.S.
3. >everyone was downloading movies and TV shows in the early 2000s.
Not normies; everyone in this case = HN-user types/techies, a very small portion of the general population.
I would visit people who were totally not technical and they'd have a PC in their livinroom with FTD on it (which was the typical Dutch piracy tool at that time). Popcorntime was there for the even less technical people. It was as easy as click and play, really. They didn't really know what they were doing but everyone has some smartass nephew who can set stuff like that up.
I find it very hard to understand that people who had no issue using windows 95 or XP and installing something like FTD can now not find anything.
I have to agree that it's harder to find Anna's archive than I thought, when I type "Download books for free" in duckduckgo it doesn't come up with Anna's Archive (or Z-Library or library genesis for that matter), if I type the names it does come up though.