You can stream popular torrents. It can be challenging with more niche content (unless you're on private trackers), but you're not going to find niche content streams in the first place.

For me personally, the OG pirating was buying bootleg VHSs/CDs/DVDs. But torrenting/P2P was the first mass scale digital piracy method.

It's still somewhat big in certain regions, even younger people torrent (although streaming piracy is more popular).