How do you think marketing works? Someone posts a cool thing they’ve done in Starfield, and someone else gets some FOMO and decides to buy the game, sub to Gamepass, get an Xbox to play it, etc.
No not everyone is pirating the game, a lot of people on Lemmy may be as this is an echo chamber of techie types, but the general audience don’t even know how to, and if they prefer to play on console, can’t.
Clearly you have beef with Bethesda, and are letting it cloud your judgement here, but the fact of the matter is lots of people are playing and enjoying the game as is, out the box before any mods are officially available.