I've seen the unhinged things Empress posts on Reddit, anytime they've got something to say that isn't directly related to cracking.
Either Empress is a team of people with the worst Social Media Manager ever or it's a huge Autist who just happens to be good at programming.
Given the usual drama in the piracy scene, the latter seems much more believable tbh.
And yet, if you use a cheapo VPN with a well-known address (shared IP) sites like Amazon, or even Wikia will block you. Why? If most of your information is 'private' anyways, why go through the step of preventing a potential customer/user just because of their IP?
Because in reality, even such a minor thing as a dinky $3/month VPN is a huge headache for people trying to farm relevant information from you. Public Cookies, Basic Telemetry, and really any sort of ad-relevant data is pretty much publically available to any interested party, and even the simplest VPNs screw that up to a large degree.
People don't go out of their way to spend a couple of bucks on a VPN and reserved IP because they think they're gonna defeat the CIA or become a Net Ghost, they do it to get around region locks, IP bans, localized pricing (and yes to pirate their favorite movies/video games).
You also get access to a broad repository of the history of a particular torrent. Like ever preferred a really obscure version of your favorite torrent? Probably impossible to find unless it was a really popular Vidya game and there's a legacy torrent still seeding.
I've still got a Myanonamouse (Private Book Tracker) account purely because there are certain editions of books that quite literally don't exist in print except as a used copy on Amazon. But because some degenerate decided to commit all their scans to a Seedbox, ebook versions of obscure early science fiction now exist.
Very niche, but also incredibly useful if you come across something that you just can't find elsewhere.
I'll tell ya a couple of three things, my estimation of Lemmy.world as a general-purpose instance just fucking plummeted.