Ableton, Reaper, Reason, and all associated VST and VSTi's from the incumbents like Arturia through to Korg and Roland, are all hardware-dongle free. Most use some sort of 30 day license server check-in or similar cloud platform intermittent auth.
N.B. I don't use Waves or UA software. Ever. Licensing models are akin to common assault.
I still remember walking into one of the highest profile million dollar mixing stages in LA, opening their Pro Tools plug-in menu and almost every single piece of software was pirated. Unfortunately even people who could pay for software (and had a strongly developed sense of IP rights for their own work product) seemed to have no issues ripping us off.
That said, there was a non-negligible amount of studio owners who had licenses but chose to use cracked versions of software stripped of DRM or otherwise bypassing the security checks in favour of maintaining stability. Lot of BSODs and IRQ issues with competing dongles with bad serial implementation.