No, OP's reading 'we used fansites' as 'piracy is necessary' is wrong. Piracy is necessary IMO, but this interview doesn't even remotely prove it, and if you think reverse engineering from source is faster and better than from docs, you are a fool.

'But what they really meant but did not take the time to say is that the devs not having the source code proves that pirating the binary is the only way'... the only way for what? They have the executables. They were put on disks. Maybe you bought one. Pick better examples in the future.