Comment by altairprime
16 hours ago
As described, the licensing system will fail you into readonly locally unless you subscribe Office Clippy 365, buy Office 2024, apply Office 2021 updates, or (not listed) apply third-party licensing cracks for Office 2019.
Presumably we’ll know soon if network firewalling the licensing server helps, but I expect it’ll just delay the intentional failure by a few months at best.
Presumably this will happen to Offica 2021 in two years, too, so it's actually worse than you say.