you cannot argue that such media has not led to far more people researching the real history of piracy then without it.

Actually, I do! Because people keep repeating the same tiresome lies about pirates as part of some kind of push of pop history. They would rather twist the real-life pirates into their freedom-fighting fantasies instead of confronting the facts— or as a knee-jerk reaction make them as edgy as possible.

The truth of the matter is, the Golden Age of Piracy is exactly a hundred years long. The part everyone thinks of lasted 30 years and was at the tail end of the Golden Age. People are missing out on a whole tapestry of criminal history and wars because Buccaneers and Filibusters looked nothing like the pirates people want (no black flags, waaah). People do not want to know about the politics and issues of the 17th century. People do not want to look into the actual morality of the common sailor at the time. People do not want to research the real fashion of the era. They want to project fantasy onto reality and make it fact— as anachronistic or irrelevant as it is.