Obviously that’s what you or I would do, but the kinds of people willing to go through the trouble of torrenting anime aren’t Crunchyroll’s prime demographic here. I’m talking about like super-normies who just want their weekly fix of Demon Slayer for free from the easiest, most accessible source.
It's the old "piracy is a service issue" thing that Gabe Newell discussed in the context of Steam and video games. A lot of people are fine with spending money on a service, even if it's not the best value, solely due to the convenience factor. Even if you could get it for free on the high seas, the effort of needing to find a torrent and download it is too much for normies. You could include the cost of a VPN to pirate safely, but you can use VPNs for things besides pirating, so whatever.
I think there's a corollary to that, however. If you intentionally make your free service more inconvenient in order to try and force people to pay money for the convenience they're used to, you're probably not going to get a lot of people to bite. Some will, but I think most people will say "nah" and find another free option, likely encouraging them to get off their asses and learn how to pirate. And once someone finds out how easy it is to own a copy of any anime they want (or movie, or TV show, or whatever), for free, forever, you're probably not getting them as a subscriber again.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I know if I were using Crunchyroll for my anime fix, and they wanted me to start paying money for things I was used to getting for free, I'd bail immediately. Youtube making their mobile ads more obnoxious did not make me want to pay for Premium, it made me look for an ad-free option, and that's how I found Youtube Vanced (soon-to-be RIP).
