"I thought it was pretty easy to disrupt / censor torrents, hasn't that been going on for a while?"
Not torrents themselves, only torrent search engines. Torrents are distributed by design, but traditional torrent directories/aggregators/search engines are centralized, thus easy targets for DCMA take-downs, ISP blocks, trials etc.
Yup, torrent search engines are the weak link when it comes to protecting the public's access to arbitrary large files, and also the front lines in the battle between the media industries and an uncensored internet.
ZeroNet is perhaps not enough on its own to solve this problem, though, since a good torrent search engine suffers from the same limitation as a good forum, which is the need to have some form of community-based moderation. If people can't remove spam search results, and spam comments, then the medium can be too easily exploited (using Sybil attacks, etc.) and become useless.
The missing piece which is holding back so many decentralised technology projects is a lack of a decentralised trust platform. A necessary step towards this would be a decentralised (and privacy-preserving) identity platform, which would have the added benefit of removing the "Log in with Facebook/Google" problem from the web.
Not torrents themselves, only torrent search engines. Torrents are distributed by design, but traditional torrent directories/aggregators/search engines are centralized, thus easy targets for DCMA take-downs, ISP blocks, trials etc.