Its completely unaffordable to the student or hobbyist, the "home edition" is too limited to be useful, so everyone starting out uses a cracked version because its been the de-facto industry standard tool since forever for reverse engineering.
Later when those people get jobs, they become another paying (through work) licensed user of IDA Pro.
What's slowly fucking IDA now is finally there are alternatives, the NSA open sourced Ghidra which can replace IDA to some extent - so smaller customers (who were always treated poorly anyway) are moving away from their product.
Its completely unaffordable to the student or hobbyist, the "home edition" is too limited to be useful, so everyone starting out uses a cracked version because its been the de-facto industry standard tool since forever for reverse engineering.
Later when those people get jobs, they become another paying (through work) licensed user of IDA Pro.
What's slowly fucking IDA now is finally there are alternatives, the NSA open sourced Ghidra which can replace IDA to some extent - so smaller customers (who were always treated poorly anyway) are moving away from their product.