It's s actually working

You should keep following your principles, but that's not the reason it's working. The amount of gamers that even know about Denuvo is tiny, and those who care enough to not buy a game because of that is an even smaller fraction of that small number.

The reason is simply because Denuvo is expensive and a recurring cost. Once a developer removes it, they no longer need to pay for it.

Basically the only games I want to play that have Denuvo currently are a handful of games published by ATLUS like Persona 5 the Royal and Metaphor: Refantazio.

I actually bought Metaphor, not realizing it had Denuvo, and then was just randomly unable to launch the game. After fiddling with some proton settings and reopening the game I got a very generic error message with a link to a website that told me I was locked out of the game for 24 hours.

I wound up returning the game.

As far as I can tell, Doom the Dark Ages has it, and many reviews are quite good. I don't know if they're good enough to convince me to install it though. Maybe I'll wait until they remove it months or years later.