True, but try doing that six years ago. Six years ago (plus or minus 1-3 years? bad memory with timelines), googling "Higurashi no Naku Koro ni" did not return the throng of convenient streaming websites and wiki pages and databases that it currently does.

I tried it, got frustrated, tried to hack myself a way to find good stuff by using image search instead, found guro porn instead, got terrified and assumed fetal position in a corner of my room. Gave up on that anime for a while, back then =P

Of course, most of that effect is that search has gotten a lot better over the years, I think.

I haven't felt the need to torrent a show in years.

There's no real need to, but it's often orders of magnitude easier to find a high-quality torrent than a high-quality stream, and torrents offer the convenience of not dealing with buffers and unstable speeds and random connection errors and so on while watching, i.e. a smoother undisturbed experience.

This is obviously valid for all kinds of full downloads in general, it just happens that almost all full anime downloads are torrents.