Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Lets compare three options as example:

One streaming service with everything:

• monetary costs: 25 €/month
• opportunity cost: login, type name in search bar, enjoy in good quality, language and subtitles of choice

Piracy:

• monetary costs: 0-5 €/month (hardware/vpn)
• opportunity costs: keep up to date with existing aggregator sites, take protective measures against identification, be wary of malware, limited scope of languages and subtitles, varying quality

Current streaming services:

• monetary costs: 100 €/month or more, if you cover most services
• opportunity cost: login to each service, look if they have the particular series/movie, be limited by region to which languages and subtitles you can use, have only certain episodes or certain seasons of a series, get a movie as a result, but actually have to pay extra for lending it...

People choose whether to pay monetary or opportunity costs. For a broke student priacy might still be the way to go, because they have time but not money. For most people a convenient streaming service will be the way to go though, because not having to worry about everything around and just finding your movie/series in 30 seconds, after you put dinner in the plates is the preferred option.

The current situation combines high monetary costs with high opportunity costs, so that piracy becomes attractive to many people, who would be happy to pay for a streaming service, that actually covers everything.

So i think "almost always" is perfectly applicable. Also keep in mind, that the offer of pirated stuff is directly related to the demand. if the demand reduces, so will the offer, which in this case would make piracy even less convenient. Of course the pricing matters, and if the one streaming service would cost say 50 €/month, more people would pirate again. But the dominant factor first is the service quality.