In the absence of detailed info on the topic, I'd tentatively guessed that this upcoming migration to a different licensing security system by both Steinberg and VSL was being driven entirely by Steinberg's new and rather secret strategy.
That is, until I found this little snippet in Steinberg's forum, dated May this year:
https://forums.steinberg.net/t/migration-from-elicenser-to-ilok/718648
So now it appears - please correct me if I'm wrong, VSL - that Steinberg and VSL are each going in their own direction on this matter.
And looking more broadly at opinions from user perspectives, I found this decent opinion-editorial by MusicTech sums it up nicely - for me at least:
https://www.musictech.net/features/opinion-analysis/steinberg-elicenser-whats-next/
So now I'm really puzzled by VSL's strategy of offering either iLok dongle or iLok Cloud but no machine activation. Much earlier in this thread, my take on VSL's move away from a dongle key was that it bodes well for VSL's future business. But now I'm not so sure about that - and I find it a bit depresssing. I'm certain I'm not alone in wanting VSL's customer base to keep expanding, since that can mean big benefits for both VSL and users. And I'd wager a substantial amount (indeed I'd probably bet the farm) that if we were able to poll a huge number of music tech users on their feelings about any dongle key, the majority would give it the thumbs down.
As for the idea of continuous Internet connection being required, I'm aware of the trend of ever more pushy and absurdly hyper-ambitious IT-centric corporations trying to "catheterise" the web into ever more punters (especially as we see happening in China). That's just another nasty, underhanded, slippery slope, and I don't believe they'll succeed in the long term. What may appear now as an unobtrusive and ever so helpful litle 'web catheter', might well eventually become more and more like 'enteral feeding' - somewhat like TV before Internet came to the rescue. But nowadays, fortunately, we've had Edward Snowden and others alerting us to the cynical, sociopathic, dark side of the web. Public resistance to the sly, underhand tricks will at some point become gigantic - perhaps even including colossal crowds with pitchforks and flaming torches turning up at various IT corporate HQs, lol. (Storming of the Bastille in 1789 was a weird historical glitch, out of the blue, right? Lolol.).
I don't see VSL as an IT-centric company at all; so why would they adopt the idea of the 'web catheter'? Who convinced them that that crock is a good idea and the way to go? Or is it perhaps just that there is no other viable off-the-shelf solution at present?