[nostrademons]

It's all relative to the alternatives. P2P was easy by desktop app standards, but concurrently with its development, the web started taking over. With webapps, you didn't need to download a program, you didn't need to deal with your firewall settings (consumer firewalls were just starting to become popular during this time period as well), you didn't need to configure upload/download rates or servers - you just clicked on a link and got a file.

[vezzy-fnord]

Sure, but an overwhelming part of file sharing still takes place under BitTorrent, with the web just being a glorified link farm for it.