Actually yes.
In my childhood it wasn’t very easy to find a licensed copy (TBF, even pirate copy sometimes), but demos would be distributed with magazines etc.
And after playing a demo which you like a licensed honestly bought copy becomes emotionally much better than piracy.
It was a working mechanism. For games which are not crap anyway.
In the end faulty security always gives edge to the stronger and more malicious side.
So if you want to protect the weak and allow people to defend themselves, you’d want such mechanisms to not be rigged for any abstract noble goal, because otherwise you are going to get fucked very practically.