What does this have to do with piracy

They are running a large community in the middle of Europe, in plain view and being personally known, and as such, liable.

skill issue

for Windows another good one is https://github.com/audiamus/BookLibConnect

IANAL (and am not a lawyer)

hard pass

I’m in this article and I don’t like it

When the source of a crack/patch isn’t trusted, I’d do like you said and install it in a VM, then compare the patched files with their unpatched copies using diffing software (Beyond Compare’s hex compare feature is useful for this). If there are a huge amount of changes, like completely different size and content, or it is protected with a packer (typically will be a several MB larger), I would definitely steer clear of it. If it’s just a few changed bytes (and maybe the digital signature overlay is stripped off), then it’s most likely safe and you can just copy the patched files out of the VM and overwrite your main install.

Edit: Also, always prefer official installers directly from the developer’s site if they are available; “pre-cracked” installers are always a red flag to me.

or for people who don’t have a week to dedicate to learning utterly deranged nonsense, just use sublime merge and never look back.

I almost always use PowerShell (Core) for automation/scripting things that don’t warrant an entire “application”. It’s as powerful as you need it to be, but I wouldn’t recommend it if you aren’t already familiar with .NET and its ecosystem.