Having a cloud account is entirely disconnected from the activation state of Windows, and always will be. The activation state of Windows is a property of a Windows installation, because Windows installations — all the ones Microsoft cares about, at least — are managed (including license management!) by the IT departments of organizations; while Windows logins are managed by individual users.

Microsoft would be breaking their own business model in half if they forced each user to have a "Windows subscription" bound to their personal cloud account, instead of being able to just sign a $10MM/yr contract with Oracle or EY or whomever for a 100K-seat volume license.

Remember also that many large-scale deployments of Windows machines aren't of personal computers at all, but of:

1. workstations with non-cloud Active Directory-managed user accounts, with the accounts and data on the machine being backed up to corporate servers and thus the machine itself able to be drop-in replaced overnight without the user even noticing the change;

2. workstations with roaming user profiles configured, where many different people log in and out of the same computer throughout the day (think: computer labs, internet cafes, etc)

3. shared workstations where many employees log in and out of the same computer throughout the day (may overlap with 1) — think of the computers behind the desks at the customer-service wickets at a bank

4. machines with no logged-in users, only an AD administrator remote-managing them through domain privileges — think e.g. digital signage

If licensing status attaches to the logged-in user, then none of these use-cases work! And together, these use-cases form 80+% of how Microsoft makes money from Windows!