Back in the day I always swore I’d never get ilok protected plugins. The wrapper bloats the plugins’ memory consumption and consumes unnecessary CPU, slows load times, etc. Then I bought the Soundtoys bundle and many others. Just became normal.
Then I swore I’d never use anything that required a dongle. And I got Cubase.
Neither were as bad as I thought before I used them. I don’t love the dongle, but I assume Steam would require you to be online, right? That sounds awful.