That is not the argument, though. Your copyright is protected regardless of the strength of your security measures. But it is also, separately, illegal to circumvent these measures. This latter prohibition becomes more far-reaching and has more collateral damage the weaker the security measures it applies to, which is worrying.

Outlawing the methods of committing a crime also (instead of just the crime) requires a balancing act between their legitimate and illegitimate uses, which seems precariously absent when talking about technically laughable “security measures” that can be circumvented by pressing F12.

Whoa there. The DMCA is not “copyright protection”. The DMCA is a bunch of additional obnoxious protections on top of copyright.

But the trick is to put a crap lock around both something that can be copyrighted but is unimportant and things that cannot be copyrighted.

Now all legal uses of everything behind that lock are illegal for circumvention reasons.

It's a way to apply the DMCA to literally anything digital. The quality of the software doesn't matter, because it isn't for security, just a legal hack.