I think it's more a generalised phrase, like when you Google something, but you don't actually use Google. Saying to look at / use pirate bay doesn't mean the exact site, just means to pirate it somehow.

Shady how? It ends up being the right place for 99% of my torrents.

I have been out of the 🏴‍☠️scene for a while and this was the most trusted one back in the days. Are there other alternatives now?

Everytime I look for alternates I end up with sites that offer torrents of movies that end in .exe. so I end up going back to TPB.

As long you downloading only video/music content you are safe. The worst outcome could be only wrong content

While I've moved to arr stack and usenet these days, I've literally never had an issue with TPB

Well as shady as a midnight walk to the convenient store... So not actually that bad.