Not necessarily even that. Piracy can benefit the developer by increasing popularity. Piracy made Bill Gates a billionaire despite his fighting tooth and nails against it.

Millennials grew up alongside modern computing (meaning the two matured together). We dealt with everything from BASIC on a C64 to DOS and then through Windows 3 through current. We also grew up alongside Linux

Only the oldest millenials did. When the youngest were born, the internet and Windows 95 were readily available and they were in middle school when the iPhone came out.

I swear it’s always Adblock Plus in memes about ad-blocking. Who makes these memes?

Yes, but pirated software is also an incredibly simple attack vector.

It’ll drop the price, so there’s that at least.

It’s really not a generational thing. Every generation has their nerds and they always are just a tiny minority.

The late Gen X/early millennials may have been an outlier because they were forced to learn to get anything working but also from those years most don’t care about tech.

In the long term it works quite a bit better as a valuation tool. Bubbles tend to not last very long.

Netflix comes around, other streaming services

The (admittedly inevitable) appearance of other streaming services was shit already since with it came exclusive content.

Also, they just translate estimated number of downloads to potentially sold tickets 1:1 (they always have). As if a pirate would actually watch all that shit if they had to pay for it. Many probably even don’t after download (like Steam games on sale).