One data point in favour, and it is the oldest thing I own.
A 2009 purchase, an audio editor, moved across four machines and two processor architectures via translation layers. It has never once phoned anywhere. Last month I used it to fix a recording and it behaved exactly as it did sixteen years ago.
The reason it survived, I think, is that its author did the unglamorous thing: no framework, no account, no update mechanism at all. It cannot break remotely because there is no remote.
Against that I have a nine-year-old licence for a mind-mapping tool that expired the moment its activation server was retired. Same "perpetual" word on the same kind of receipt. The difference is entirely whether the thing needs to ask permission to run, which nobody tells you at purchase and which is the only fact that matters.