Would never touch it personally, but I found your history of Windows piracy in China very interesting!
In the US the license was always bundled with the hardware unless you build your own. I worked for my university’s computer labs IT department and was able to acquire a key that I used for about a decade. Later, also scavenged a key from an old broken laptop, back when they printed it on the bottom, for my current Windows partition. Best to avoid paying for it…
I’ve been using mostly Windows for a desktop and Linux for servers for many years, but 11 is where I have to call it quits. My old friend Debian leads me forward from here :)