As someone who was selling Windows desktop app for 10 years and made nice money out of it I have mixed feelings. On one hand it was always a losing fight against determined hackers on the other the tools weren't widely available so the problem wasn't as widespread. We lost quite a bit to piracy but could still make a decent business. With widely available LLMs I think that business model is truly dead though. Not only hacks/cracks but also any kind of smart idea you may have will quickly be reversed engineered from your binary.

If you never lost money to piracy you may think that "those people are not your potential customers anyway". This is not true because people will crack your software and then resell it - often pretending to be legit resellers operating under your brand. To add insult to injury they will send their customers to your support as well.

If I ever come out with something smart again there is no way I am shipping it as executable. SaaS it is for better or worse.