The can sue them for anti-circumvention statutes in the DMCA. But not for infringement, since the developers did not do the infringement, they only enabled it.

How did the cracked game enter circulation, if the crackers didn't redistribute it?

In this very specific case, it's a no-cd patch, you can be a legitimate owner of the copy but for some very valid reasons that do not want load the CD every time you play the game. (Like disk and/drive wearing, or just don't like the hassle)

Do those statutes apply for interoperability? Which takes precedence?

This is basically how Rockstar used it - to make the game work on computers without CDs. So the actual rights holder has recognised that this tool or one like it is legitimately required for interoperability, between the game as a piece of technology and a modern computer. They won't work together otherwise.

Maybe I am being too tricky but that's how I see it. And if that makes it a legitimate work then it's funny to think about the consequences.

Certain excemptions are provided in the DMCA, and have been established via jurisprudenence:

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/10/28/2021-23...

Geeks often think that the law is some sort of blockchain-esque thing that is absolute, context-free and machine-interpretable.

In reality, many laws require 'guilty intent' (mens rea). This is why we have 'judges', who perform 'judgement'.

So the same tool called 'no-cd', marketed as a backup tool may be judged 'OK', where 'WaR3z HaCk.exe' published by a group of known software pirates will be judged 'anti circumvention'

NoCD patches are commonly distributed as an already-patched version of the executable, which would count as infringement.

After some short searching online, looks like for copyright infringement litigation, the statute of limitation is three years.