To be honest, I just love reusing old stuff and giving it new meaning ☺️. And fixing stuff too. Sure, they will eventually be worthless, but I try and extend their life as much as possible ☺️.
Regarding the movies thing, each to his own 🤷 😉. I don’t judge. Hell, even I sonetimes download 1080p and watch that on my TV, but it’s mostly a special case scenario, like some good movie I’ve wanted to watch for a long time, but never got around to it, or something like.
No hardware supports it out of the box (standalone players), thus, it’s not gonna happen for pirated content.
Plus, AV1 was nowhere near ready when x265 was in v2.x. It was open source, it had x in front of it (the logical successor to x264… name wise at least), it conformed fo the MPEG HEVC standard (in most things)… what was there not to like 🤷. Pirates don’t care about things like “but I have to pay royalties to use it in a commercial environment”… hence, why they’re pirates.