I was using streaming-based sites the first few years because it was easy but it had its issues. With uBlock Origin, ads and popups weren’t a problem anymore but there were still issues like bad quality, buffering and your progress in a show not being tracked. This promptet me to try out Jellyfin with the arr stack and it’s so much better. I had to get used to having to wait for shows and movies to download before being able to watch them but the experience was so much better aside from that. Great quality, a nice interface where your progress is tracked, everything loads perfectly fine, I can make accounts for friends and family and no ads or shit like that. It took some time to perfect my setup but now I have a lot of private torrent trackers and usenet and I can get pretty much everything I want to watch, even in German, in the best quality that is available, especially when something’s available in AV1.

You need time, knowledge and money to get a setup as good as I have and it’s worth it for me personally (selfhosting is also my main hobby, after all) but most people don’t have all that, so I can understand why doing it like this is a pretty niche thing and why not a lot of people are doing it nowadays.