Welp, I heard the story back in the mid nineties from someone that worked in an architect office. One save or a few without a dongle makes basically no difference but systematic license abuse will make you have to spend man hours to redraw the entire thing before delivering it to the customer. Considering how absolutely hysterical some corporate anti piracy measures were at the time I would not say it is not unbelievable, this being very early internet era and all.

I recall some other corporate oriented software that would after some time only print blank pages without explanation if it detected a crack, there were a few console games that would corrupt your entire memory card with all your saves from everything, and music software and VSTs that would spread a cracked warez version to "the scene" that would have a trojan do other nasty things to your computer as a pre-emptive revenge.

But you do you and have all the smarts. Who knows, I'm probably AI too.