These were generally useless at the time, at least as it pertains to online piracy.

Enough to keep honest people honest and not copy the software to their immediate friends, but if the software had people interested in pirating it someone would disassemble it and just jump over the part that looked for the dongle while keeping all the software functionality intact and these patched versions would be readily available online to anyone who knew where to look.

At the end of the day not really any more secure than various software-based copy protection schemes, just more wasteful due to the extra hardware.