How is pirating harder than streaming?

They're, at worst, equal.

If I have a show/movie I want to watch, I first have to go to an indexing site like JustWatch to figure out which streaming service it's on. If it's not on any, or not on one I'm subbed to, I'm already having to go pirate.

Whereas when pirating, I typically just search my tracker for the show I want to watch, sort the results by most seeders, then download the highest one. I just save the .torrent on the shared network folder on my Raspberry Pi (Which literally just shows up as Z:\torrentfiles), and Transmission starts downloading it. A couple minutes later, it's ready and I sit on my couch and watch it.

I will grant you that the initial setup takes a little more effort. I signed up for a private tracker where torrents are vetted. I had to configure Transmission to auto-download. I had to install Kodi. But...meh? That's it? All that takes less than 10 minutes and only has to be done once.

If you're still using pirate software akin to LimeWire where you have to wade through results like "Pluribus-S01E01.mpg.exe" and deal with results where for some reason people renamed files (Back in the KaZaA days, I downloaded "JackAss.avi" expecting it to be the Jackass movie and it was actually Fight Club. WHY!?), then yeah, pirating is a pain in the ass. But otherwise, nah, it's really easy.

EDIT: As others have mentioned, pirated content is simply easier to consume. I can watch offline and have full control over playback. Never any ads or unskippable content.