It wasn’t guilt, it was reliability. Cracked versions of the tools I relied on for work stopped getting updates, which meant compatibility issues piled up quietly until a file wouldn’t open correctly one day and I lost an afternoon figuring out why.
Paying for the legitimate version meant automatic updates, actual customer support when something broke, and no more nervousness every time a new operating system update rolled out. The subscription cost less over a year than the single afternoon I lost troubleshooting a corrupted file.
It’s a boring, practical reason rather than a moral one, but it’s the reason that actually changed my behavior.