A full actual version of SOLIDWORKS costs, no joke, $10,000 for a professional license ($8k plus $2k/yr support contract). An engineer at, say, Tesla is going to have that paid for by their employer while designing the Cybertruck. That Tesla engineer is also going to want to use SOLIDWORKS to design their bike shed. Their two choices for their bike shed are either use their work computer, or pirate it. (Using non-solidworks CAD isn't really an option due to the muscle memory involved with the application, and the resulting switching cost.) So it's getting pirated. But that also means their next employer better have SOLIDWORKS and so that "lost" sale for a bike shed really isn't.
But you'd be insane to use a pirated copy of SOLIDWORKS for anything professional (like if you were the Cybertruck's door handle subcontractor or whatever), just like you would be insane to use a pirated copy of windows or Office. But let's be real, plenty of people do that. Whether it's because they're poor, or whether it's because they're cheap, or both, full list price is simply not gonna get paid, and so they'll go with the cheaper option - it's just that cheaper option happens to be a $0 pirated copy in most cases. Some offices will have one genuine copy for one computer and pirated copies for the rest of everyone, especially part-time contractors. In that way, a cheaper academic license, even accepting that there's no fool proof way of checking for that, or having a time-limited entrepreneur/start-up option will lead to more sales and more money.
It then becomes an exercise in the dark art of pricing things, to figure out where that sweet spot actually is. A 30 or 90 day copy which is hopefully long enough to build the bike shed, priced right, is an actual sale that can be made that otherwise wouldn't. A cheaper limited version for the non-premium seats at the company are other additional sales to be made.