For pirating DRMed material? Probably because every major DRM scheme has been compromised, so it's easier to just grab the original stream.

If you're talking about in relation to the article, how would screen capture software let you skip ads? I could see it used for multiplexing, but playback on multiple devices would be tricky unless you ripped the content first.

I think it's used widely enough: God is it ugly... You are screwing up with FPS and then you have to re-encode on top of your already encoded (i.e. not raw), captured thing , eww... Plenty of cleaner ways, like DVD or Blu-Rays which protections are cracked and with which you get the untampered original.

It's actually incredibly simple to do this.

Open Boardcaster is free and does this well.

That's why they want DRM control all the way down to the hardware.