Piracy also includes unauthorized use.
Unauthorized use just means using it without purchasing a legitimate license which is already covered by unauthorized copying, since you need to acquire a copy to use it in the first place.
Depending on code licensing, modifing game's code can be also illegal and goes under unauthorized use. Afaik that this game doesn't specify licensing, so by default it's prohibited to modify. You can call it cracking or breaking licensing agreement if you don't like this generalisation...
All mods would be illegal if simply modifying the code was by default prohibited.
This is not cracking either since no DRM was tampered with nor is there any reason to as it's legally downloaded from the official source.
The artificial in-game barrier was just there because the dev didn't want to take out the patreon content from it.
That's not a DRM. It's like calling it piracy if you use a decompiler to extract in-game assets because the assets were originally encrypted which is a barrier.
Also, even if you access past demo, the game will show missing image errors and such as it was WIP from older patreon build. It wasn't playable content, just some texts.
I assume this comparison is probably related to loses to product owner would suffer from the leaked product. Like stealing potential/expected income
It's not a leaked product when the content was included in the public demo by the dev themselves. Anybody had access to it on Steam for free. It was also a personal use case since the modification wasn't shared with anyone even though people can easily figure it out themselves as it was as simple as changing a single line of boolean value.
You can't "steal potential/expected income" either. That's like saying pirates are stealing potential income from the devs by pirating, most pirates wouldn't have bought the game anyway, so they're not a measurement of the sales a dev could've potentially made.
Not that it would've mattered to the devs as they're already profitting off of subscription.
...I hope someone saved an older version of the game and would be up to share - I'd love to catch a glimpse of her in those outfits!...
I've archived the old build
v1.2.6.20 FULL which is before the art rework and workshop integration.