The mod that got me into modding still has a special place in my heart. It was the Shockwave mod for C&C Generals. Shockwave absolutely could have been vanilla if EA deigned to finish the Zero Hour expansion. It was just pure polished perfection for that game.
Yes, cracked Denuvo games actually run better because you aren’t running a virus anti piracy software in the background. It runs at the kernel level and Crowdstrike is a pretty good case study on why that’s bad.