Brain rot, job destruction, increased inequality, massive acceleration in global warming, massive decrease in the quality of critical systems, societal and economic collapse...
They didn't use it for placeholders (which wouldn't excuse them anyway, if you want a placeholder you can pay an artist to make it).
They got caught using it in production and came up with the placeholder excuse (which no one who's ever seen a placeholder texture would fall for) on the spot, throwing the QA team under the bus to try to cover what is clearly a systemic problem with the company.
torrenting/P2P was the first mass scale digital piracy method.
IRC? Napster? Edonkey? Emule? Kademlia?
And, hell, before that there was that guy in class who for five bucks would burn you a CD with any game you wanted, which he probably got off usenet...
And of course for music there was the old double deck cassette copier...
(Personally the first software crack I remember was dismantling Monkey Island's “dial a pirate” wheel so I could photocopy it to share with friends after copying the diskettes...)
Yes. Shit's buggy enough as it is, infect it with this crap and it's outright malware.