Netflix user base grows by tens of millions each year and their ad supported plan is the most favourite. And their growth is slowly turning into exponential.
I think a lot of people keep paying for nostalgia reasons
I think you're talking shit. Netflix had 21m customers in 2011 and they have over 300m today. They're getting tens of millions of new customers each year and at least half of them are choosing to watch ads. Ad subscriptions have grown to be 1/3 of all subscriptions. Everyone loves ads and Netflix.
Just imagine that your personal anecdote is not representative of human behaviour. The biggest lie and a myth is "I will pay more not to see ads". No, you won't.
Are you high, kiddo? Their customer base is steadily growing by tens of millions each bloody year. Netflix is a publicly traded company, everyone has access to all of their financial information, including the customer base.
That time was super short, happened only in a few selected countries and is an anomaly blip in the history of the world. And even if you think that your life is noticeably worse today, you're still far far better off than the majority of the population today and throughout history.
As for why this time has ended: humans have a need to live in a need. Otherwise they become bored and destroy everything they have. Again, that state of life is not normal, humans cannot live like that, we're not adapted to such conditions.
No, not really. First of all, you can disable uploads. Second, you can use a seed box hosted in a country which doesn't prosecute uploaders. So, you can be clean for all legal intents and purposes.
Compilers strip all the bullshit from the code. Most software projects have shitty code structure and navigating them without prior exposure is a bloody nightmare. Everything gets a lot easier in binary.
Compiler optimisations flatten the code into an easier to understand structure. You don't have to just around function definitions in multiple files when the compiler inlined them all for you to see on one screen.
Assembly debuggers usually have a lot more features than source code based ones: trapping OS calls, scripting, etc. They make life so much easier.
Most software developers have no fucking clue how computers work, it's all magic to them. People joke about "vibe coding with AI" these days, but let's be real, 99% of software developers are vibe coders, but with Google instead of AI. Of course these people will never understand a bit of assembly, they can't even fucking grasp the basics of higher level languages!
There's nothing hard about binaries, code is code.
All cars will yield to a bicycle in the UK, because less protected members of the road traffic always take priority.