IIUC it doesn't matter much if HDCP is cracked because the licenced chips (or knock-offs from the same factory) end up in stripping devices (or devices that are

IIUC it doesn't matter much if HDCP is cracked because the licenced chips (or knock-offs from the same factory) end up in stripping devices (or devices that are marketed as having another function like display cloning but also effectively strip the HDCP). On top of that most pirates prefer to crack the encryption much earlier. Ideally the video stream is captured before the video is decoded. This avoids quality loss that would occur when re-encoding the video. So cracking HDCP is only "interesting" if you don't want to buy the (very available) hardware and are not going to re-encode or are ok with the generation loss.