Even if one accepts the idea that an action that leaves the owner in possession of his property is somehow tantamount to theft, the concept of being spied upon and only being allowed to use your own property so long as your purposes align with the previous owners is more than sufficient justification for not paying for software:
Photoshop is SPYING on you now. This is nuts. @Photoshop has new terms that require you allow them to view everything you create, and reserves the right to deactivate your @Adobe software if you make stuff they don’t like. Of course they say “for legal purposes” but we all know it is to feed their machine AI and keep you from making wrong-think.
It’s disappointing that the open source teams for projects like GIMP still just haven’t quite been able to replicate the basic utility of Adobe products like Photoshop and Illustrator the way they have with Microsoft Office products.