It’s not so much paradox endorsing piracy as it was them not caring and thus releasing it without any form of DRM or even install features beyond copying files. This meant that grabing it off of someone else was just drag&drop from a network share, and then double click to play.
Preinstalls is the only way I’ve paid Microsoft recently, and that was for two gaming PCs for my kids. Before that it was when I bought a laptop with preinstalled OS in 2009.
Only time i paid them directly was for the win98 upgrade license, which was objectively worth it since I could use my Win3.1 floppies as an upgrade starting point.
Now I’m a linux user. I only have windows on my work laptop.