USB license dongles are still very common in industrial automation, I work for a company that uses it. You don't want an internet outage (or an AWS outage) to take down a production line for a day. You also expect to set up a system once and then have it just work for a decade or so.
In our case, the copy protection would still be as easy to bypass as the one in the article.
You can turn normal USB flash drive into simple dongle if it has readable serial numbers with device id. Easy to bypass but most people don't.
Actual dongles with encryption and processor cost only $15 in batches of 100.
UnRaid does a variant of this; license is tied to the serial of the USB drive. It barely writes to the drive, so wear isn't meant to be much of an issue.