Piracy

downloading a repack made by some Russian somewhere in 15 parts from 5 different filesharing websites

Never had this problem with fitgirl but rinru users unfortunately end up using some awful rate limited site usually. It's always a pleasant surprise when it's a drive link tho

The latter option does leave you with the game in your Steam account though

This is why I use them. Someone hosted a zomboid server on here but it's set to steam only, I don't want to give any money to valve if possible and I'm definitely not buying the game a third time at full price so I just used a gift card and got it for ~$7.

Honestly if I end up in a similar situation I'll probably just do it again