Very much this. Decades ago, when I couldn’t justify the cost of software, I generally knew what places I could trust, and what places might be more sketchy, and what places were guaranteed to infect my system. The cracking scene was very competitive, and any place that messed with the final binary would get blacklisted, making it very hard to get zero day releases from various groups.

I have no idea what the landscape looks like today, and I’d be reluctant to run anything outside a vm, since I no longer know where the reputable sources are, but I’m sure there are still private trackers and discord servers where you could trust every link.