Sci-hub has become significantly less useful because all new uploads are paused pending resolution of a court case in India. That includes anything published in the last year. A large portion of a working academic's reading load will be keeping up with recently published literature.
Just imagine how useful search engines would be if you had to email someone every time you wanted to click a link. Just keeping up with the literature is typically a dozen or more papers a week, plus skimming dozens to hundreds more if you're actively doing research. That's a lot of email and it's a lot of unnecessary burden for the very nice people who reply.
Piracy and open access are the only scalable alternatives to institutional access.
