I think a few bucks is no big investment for most people, and by that, I mean on our forum marketplace/digital good board where anyone can buy keys/license for many software, which includes Windows licenses. While this may still be a practice in some parts of the world, time of cracked software and even torrents for me is actually becoming a thing of the past.
It was certainly influenced by the fact that I own cryptocurrency, but also is again connected with the possibility of buying cheap licenses and paying them with BTC. Very fast internet solved the problem of torrents, it's much easier to view content without downloading it.
You can see here that microsoft office costs 99 uSD per year. This is not a few bucks , specially outside USA.
https://products.office.com/en-us/compare-all-microsoft-office-products?&activetab=tab%3aprimaryr1
I think it is relatively safe to piracy those products, but I had an opportunity to buy an original one for a few bucks (but that was lucky)