That's a weird characterization when a few sentence before the article says "Sony bought Crunchyroll from AT&T".
To be honest, I don't think there's any ideal situation for media consumption. People want to be able to watch everything on a single platform, but that means consolidation, and so less competition on price.
Crunchyroll's history of being a pirate site is interesting. They were their own thing, gradually went legit after partnering with some studios and Japanese TV stations, then some investor bought them and combined it into "VRV" which was supposed to be a collection of nerdy fandom streaming services. Then that was bought up by AT&T along with Warner and a bunch of other companies as they were trying to create a mega streaming service with HBO Max at the time.
They actually left Crunchyroll mostly alone during this time, and I was subscribed and actually appreciated the service. They still felt very "fan-powered" and some of the streaming tech they used were based on open source projects that pirate fansubs also used. Some of the shows also ended up streaming on HBO Max along with some Cartoon Network/Adult Swim shows from Warner.
Then a few years later AT&T backtracks on the whole plan and wants to sell off stuff to reduce their debt, and sells CR off to Sony (and merges it with Funimation) and Warner to Discovery.
I ended up unsubscribing around this time, and CR started becoming more corporate and adding extra DRM to the video, preventing screenshots to share on social media. They never treated their translators well, but I've been reading leaks from employees about how Sony corporate execs were taking over and moving things to some crap AI translation and subtitle platform too.
