I found the pirates to be both numerous (eventually 3 or more in an instance) and much more dangerous and engineered than the regular NPC pirates I see most of the time; (though fortunately they work individually - not in a pack)
Ally-green AX pilots didn't seem to care or help in a firefight either. Not sure why, I guess pirates aren't their concern. Rescue ships send you repair limpets ...but I believe I saw them sending repairs to the pirates as well. Bad rescue-ship! Bad!
So I recommend treating the pirates with more caution than regular pirates; either get scanned with empty cargo holds, or pick up some of the floating junk while searching for the stuff you're after so that you can give them some loot you don't care about, then they'll leave you alone.
There also seem to be a lot fewer canisters and materials floating around than before the caustic cloud dispersed, but Titan Drive Components still appear after a while so no complaints
Interestingly, when a pirate was hunting me (trying to scan me when I was flying my titan cold-extraction ship, meaning I break his scan each time I move away), I did the Titan AX trick of hiding in one of the folds of the larger titan debris ...and the pirate couldn't find me even with clear line of sight at short range, similar to Thargoids. I guess that complicated geometry really messes with the scanners...
...Or (in my headcanon) the ship's Carapace Pack is doing its job; the ship blending in as thargoid debris
While waiting for TDC, I scoop the grade-5 thargoid mats. We don't have a use for many of them yet , but I expect at some point in the future there will be a Thargoid materials trader so having an assortment of G5s to trade will be useful. Common G5s include organic circuitry, propulsion elements, sensor fragments (ram a sensor canister to smash it into fragments)