I learned Photoshop on pirated copies. However, as a young professional that couldn't risk any of the malarkey involved with relying on an outdated, pirated tool cracked with a program written and compiled by who knows, I needed a real license-- that's especially true because PDFs were a major vector for malware infections at that point. However, I also could not afford to spend many hundreds of dollars upfront on their products! When they introduced the CC subscription, it was a an absolute lifesaver. Especially for hobby users or professionals with low-collaboration or less involved use cases, it's easily more expensive over the life of the software. But for people that consistently need the latest features in any number of their programs, it's actually a lot better.

(And no, the open source alternatives do not work for my workflow, and they REALLY didn't back then. I might be able to squeak by with inkscape's current tools for typesetting, but having to work between that and gimp to modify type in an interactive layout would be idiotic in a professional workflow. It would be even clunkier than having to quickly develop a native GUI app a la winforms or in X-code but only being able to edit code in a word processor, and then pasting it into the IDE for syntax checking and compilation.)