Copyright infringement isn't theft or stealing. It's copyright infringement. If you could walk down the street and make a copy of any car you see for free you wouldn't deprive the owner of the car of his property. By copying you deprive the designer of the car the right to the scarcity of cars with his design. The problem is that we need to pay designers for R&D otherwise they stop designing cars.

>Stealing software is just as bad.

Stealing software the same way people steal physical would require the thief to delete all copies of the codebase. This happens through ransomware, not piracy.