When my kid wanted to do animated vector graphics, I looked at the options. There was a $22/mo subscription option with Adobe, and there was a competitor whose product I could buy outright for $30. I went with the competitor. Two months and 10 projects later, my kid has moved on to other interests. I ended up saving $14 over those 2 months. In fact what would have happened is I would have paid for 4 or 5 months of subscription until I got around to noticing that they haven't been using it lately, then I'd have to jump through whatever hoops they have set up to cancel the subscription. With the software I purchased, when they want to go back and do a couple of more animations in a few months, I won't have to worry about restarting a subscription.

I suspect that at this point, they're so dominant among graphics professionals that most broke freelancers are going to feel that they have little choice but to suck it up and pay for the subscription. I'm not convinced the subscription was a direct response to closing a widely used activation loophole but I'm sure piracy more broadly played into Adobe's thinking. Given that they maintained almost uniquely high pricing among software widely used by consumers/prosumers/freelancers/etc., there were always extremely high incentives to bypass Adobe protections.

At the same time, as you suggest, those large numbers of non-corporate users almost certainly helped Adobe emerge as the de facto standard that it became.

The student subscription costs almost nothing, and the professional is the same price as netflix.