It’s a numbers game for me. I think it really does depend where you live, and what you are downloading. 30+ years for me for the record, but I’m generally pretty low on the arrrrrr scale. Basically I’m guilty for like suburban house wife levels of pirating, downloading albums not yet released, the odd movie and maybe one to two PC games a year. Actually I’m a pretty big book pirate too, and I guess I do have IPTV, but my point is it’s all for super-micro levels of personal consumption, I’m not wholesale uploading, I’m not resharing it, nor am I dealing in anything weird or gross. So wasting your time on me isn’t going to be very fruitful, zero impact to the greater world and economy. Hence I don’t waste much time with VPNs and all of that, I just don’t think there’s much reason to. Plus I don’t fully trust that the NSA or whatever bureaucrat-org doesn’t have a way to front run your traffic out of the ISP even before it hits the VPN.
I also think they are a bad idea, just for the general scale issue if not anything else. If person X from GeneralScammyHack country wants to steal my plate to sell on the darknet, they have to get on a plane, find my house in suburbia, break into my garage and even then find a proprietary screwdriver or hit the snap on truck before they come. Point is, they can’t hack it. Same with my license, like they need to come take my wallet or I need to lose it. Basically all I have to worry about is Methany peeling my plate off at the 7-11 and committing some super low level impropriety, maybe a local murder or two. I’m not going to find Jason Bourne using my plate in New Jersey or anything like that, and if I do, it’s just odds and quite an involved level of forgery.