For VHS, it was much more common to record things from broadcast. Even if someone had multiple machines, copies using standard consumer VHS degraded noticeably even in one generation.

For DVDs, writing drives were expensive and uncommon for a long time, and most early players didn’t like burned discs, so you were limited in how you could watch them anyway. I know that some people got into the mindset of physically cloning the discs, but I feel like it was at least as common to rip, re-encode just the main title with a more modern codec to shrink the size, and store that smaller copy electronically.

Yes, and you’ve got to remember to download it as soon as you buy it. I’ve been stung a couple of times by companies going out of business or inventing rationales for removing “old” things.

The original StarCraft and Brood War expansion didn’t require Internet for installation. And while the original boxed copies (I got the “Battle Chest” re-release which is the same) required the CD to be in the drive, the last one or two official update patches let you copy the .mpq (?) data files from the CDs into the installation directory so you can play without them.