GOG does this too they will sell you cracked games and the money goes to whoever currently owns the IP, there is almost no point giving money to GOG at that point since they don't do anything and the IP holder didn't do anything either. Actually GOG might steal mods and claim they made them like with system shock.
This honestly sounds like the perfect distribution model. You get the game, IP holder gets paid, no one is bothered by DRM. If you don't want to pay because you don't want to pay, well that's up to you.
Like I'm kind of confused by the premise of your argument and excuse me if I got it wrong but certainly you're not saying if you pay, it better have some kind of DRM?
It's not GOG that does that. A lot of developers that publish there having lost the source code or the tools and knowledge to build it upload cracked or patched releases themselves. And it's not a GOG thing either, as for example Sam & Max: Hit the Road is just the cracked DOS game bundled inside a ScummVM runner on both Steam and GOG releases.
Rockstar used securom for the original disc release
Razor (an infamous piracy group) cracked the game shortly after release but only for Windows XP (Vista didn't exist yet)
Rockstar released the game on Steam "without securom" but in reality is just using Razor's crack
Fans eventually (like a decade later) realize there's Razor signatures in the executable on Steam
Rockstar pushes an update with a new executable, however this wasn't properly tested and is broken due to how the anti-piracy acts.
Nintendo did the same thing. I don't remember the exact details, but they took a pirated copy of NES Super Mario Bros and were reselling it on another platform. As much as a dislike Nintendo and Take-Two/Rockstar for their business practices I can understand that it's probably easier to just take back "stolen" and modified code and use it for themselves instead of repeating the process of getting around old copyright BS in order to resell the game.
Tldr: Nintendo outsourced the work for dumping NES ROMs and developing a NES emulator for GameCube and that contractor added the standard headers to dumps they made from original cartridges provided by Nintendo. Someone saw the headers and drew conclusions.