Okay than just my two cents. I use torrents a lot and never had a problem finding what i needed, and i would certainly not pay a dime for some obscure per-bite streaming. Not in torrents.
Private trackers may have free entry but cost money in other ways. It's not easy to get buffer on a home connection. I have probably spent $200 on my seedbox over the years. Pay-per-bite sounds a lot cheaper in contrast.
In context of the US maybe it is different. Mine is 200mbit/s no caps $7/mo connection - common in Moscow - and I don’t remember caring about traffic or speed ever. Any torrents with 5+ seeds is like whoooosh and it’s done.
I've had plenty of problems, especially more obscure material or material not in english/russian is often just plain not available. In one case, I needed an older version of knoppix not available on their website anymore but I had a torrent file. The download took 3 months to complete due to the single seeder of that file going offline for that time.
If you only download the popular fresh content like the latest Debian ISO or something like that, of course you never have problems.