The same for software. Even Microsoft is going fully Cloud. Just had problems to activate my MS Office for Mac Business 2019, which I bought in physical. They now require on @outlook.com email address to be able to activate. Otherwise I can't use my "box" software.
Outside of activation, it is easy to use MS Office for Mac completely offline -- there's a checkbox for that in preferences. You will lose some marginal functionality, some of which I prefer to be disabled (like generating pdfs of your documents server-side instead of client-side).
It took me almost 3 days to find the problem. Microsoft changed that and between all "answers" there is only one single thread in the Microsoft forums that had the solution.
Some years ago, I activated some Office licenses using my company email; we never did any hosting with O365 or whatever was it's predecessor, and at the time, everything went fine. All I had to do was to create live account using that email address.
Which means, that you need to associate your existing account with an @outlook.com address. It seems, that Microsoft changed that requirement somewhere in 2020/2021.
Yes, previously Microsoft account with whatever email address was enough. But they changed that.
I stumbled upon that while upgrading to new hardware, which requires new activation of the Office products.
Just do it. You won't regret it. I also bought office 2016 cheap at some point in time. That's even better. Faster, nicer UI.. just to give you feedback xD
The Gaben has spoke: "piracy is more about convenience than price"