You're partially wrong. Denuvo allows a limit on how many PC's a game can be activated on within 24 hours, but doesn't have an activation limit on the lifetime of the product.
It does require a one-time online activation when it runs, but that's the same as Steam. Nobody cries about Steam as hard as Denuvo.
Also, it doesn't require periodical online re-authentication. Maybe upon a reinstall, but you'd be going online to download the game anyway. Who even buys retail PC copies these days? Most require partial game downloads from services like Steam or Origin, so box copies are useless.
It requires reauthentication every time they patch the game.
New releases using Denuvo often get small <100KB "patches" pushed out 2-4 times a week for their first month or two to force reactivation.
Steam often downloads these in the background without me noticing, since they're tiny, but then if I go to play a game when my connection is offline I'm blocked from playing it.
Every single game that I've bought using Denuvo has been a nuisance -
even the RE7 demo used it.
If you're relatively new to PC gaming, and/or happen to have a good internet with very high uptime, maybe you don't care about the inconvenience.
But as someone that's been playing PC games all his life, and still goes back and plays old games, DRM like Denuvo is a real problem for the preservation of games - especially if it relies upon a server still existing 20 years from now.
Instead, it's more likely that a game would be pulled from sale or left to die if the servers disappeared, rather than have the publisher remove the DRM.
We know that developers/publishers often don't hold onto old code, as some games have been redistributed on digital platforms using cracks that strip out the DRM rather than distributing clean executables.
