Digital media owned lock and key by shitty media companies? Yeah it sucks

Rips and archives lovingly maintained and shared by regular people? Pretty much necessary since physical media and old machines will eventually stop working and be useless as anything other than museum pieces

Like cool, you have one of the 200 remaining copies of some obscure Mega Drive game. You know what's even cooler? Being able to download it and an emulator and being able to play it on any machine in 5 minutes