What I miss the most about this "peak warez" period (and most of the mid to late 00s, basically) is the huge amount of blogs uploading rare old music. During this sweet period I was able to get a lot of very rare music from all over the world (as a bouns, you could in practice guarantee that it was virus-free since unlike actual warez these files weren't executable. Yes, I know that dedicated attackers can still find a way, but for your average script kiddie it was much harder to include a trojan in an MP3).
There are things that to this day I haven't been able to find on Bandcamp or on streaming services, including youtube, but which I was able to download during this small gilded age. Then again I weaned myself from streaming services (and from anything "as a service") years ago, so maybe things have changed. I also remember finding a lot of rarities in Soulseek when I had lucky days, but now there is far fewer people using it. In general direct download was so much better for this kind of content, because you only needed one contributor uploading it, and it was available for everyone. In P2P sharing you need much more luck to find someone seeding what you want.
I wish finding rare music was so easy in legal ways. I just want to download DRM-free albums and I will gladly pay (nowadays I buy a lot of music from Bandcamp), but in many cases that's not a possibility any more. I have also found myself in a case where music is available but not in my country. I remember a time when the only place where I found certain albums was in the german Amazon Music, but since I'm in Spain, I wasn't allowed to buy them. Gabe Newell is 100% right when he notes that piracy is a matter of convenience and not price.
Some parts of the internet have certainly got worse with time and this is one of them. Bah, get off my lawn.