They are still useful if you don't want to source and combine releases+cracks+configurations yourself, or if you want to archive games in a space-efficient manner. I have to imagine most people installing repacks are not just doing so because they're faster to download.
German infrastructure has been neglected for several decades. In the past, the whole phone grid was nationalized under the Deutsche Telekom, which eventually got spun off into a regular company.
For some insane reason the government basically let them keep almost all of the existing telecommunications infrastructure, giving them a quasi monopoly for many years and the lobbying power to delay upgrading the grid to modern fibre connections in favor of squeezing marginal improvements out of the old copper wires.
Even today the upgrading is going slowly, but at least in cities the connections are reasonably fast, I have about 300 mbits in a fairly small town (about 200k people)
100Mbps is average affordable speed in Australia sadly.
The pro big business political party here (LNP) sabotaged our nationwide fibre rollout commenced in 2007. It's taken this bloody long to finally begin undo the deliberate sabotage of our nation's broadband infrastructure done to benefit Rupert Murdoch & the incumbent monopolist Telco.