This whole discussion is a damn joke. Perhaps everyone here is a little too young or too new to the hobby to have a little perspective.
Why is anime and manga so popular overseas? Is it because all of these lovely Japanese companies did so much to bring this content to non-Japanese speakers? Is it because international companies invested tons of money to get the mediums socialized and into the mainstream consciousness of non-Japanese speakers?
Hah.
The only reason why companies like k manga can and do exist is because of the countless hours regular people invested into creating fansubs and manga scanlations. This work was done free of pay, and was an up-hill battle against the very same companies that have for some time now been cracking down on fansubs and scanlations.
Manga and anime is popular in North America and the rest of the world DESPITE the various Japanese IP holders mismanaging their overseas efforts for literal decades (and through to today). They're popular DESPITE official international distributors and partners doing the Hollywood equivalent of hiring random people off the street to be voice actors right up until the 2000s/2010s.
If not for fan efforts anime and manga would still be considered as either cartoons for children or weird fetish cartoons for creeps. Now what the popularity is all there, everyone and their grandmother wants to hop in to rake in the money, all the while continuing to treat the people who made this all happen as enemies.
And you know what, that's perfectly fine. Nobody ever got into scalation expecting these corporations to thank them. Yet, the issue was never just a lack of access. It was a lack of quality. Poor dubs, crappy edits, slow scans, poor translations, and much more. Yes, the biggest issue for many was a lack of access, but let's not pretend now that there are a handful of mediocre services that we all need to do our duty and throw money at them.
As it is today, these services are all worse than piracy. You've got people that continue to translate and sub shows for free entirely because the official services continue to suck.
The whole premise of anime and manga piracy is ridiculous to begin with. This market wouldn't exist without piracy. When we talk about these companies losing money to piracy what we're really talking about are magical unrealized profits that exist only on paper.
While I'm sure we all feel for the creators and want them to succeed, these aren't self published individuals. The onus is on their partners to bring their products to market, and their partners are the ones that will most heavily benefit from our support. Don't be a shill for corporations that want nothing more than to offer you as little as possible while charging as much as possible. This entire market was created by us, the fans. They don't need to thank us, but the very least they could do is provide a convenient and competitive service.
Like, you've got people in here saying people should use VPNs to access this content. Really? I think you've all got this relationship way mixed up, and this kind of attitude is exactly what leads to the myriad of anti-consumer bullshit we see across the world today.