Dongles were extremely widely used in the 1990s and early 2000s; for anything more advanced than consumer software you'd almost expect them? Almost every DAW, video editor, high-end compiler, engineering/CAD package, or 3D suite used them, certainly.

I think sometime in the late 1990s FlexLM switched from dongles to "hardware identifiers" that were easily spoofed; honestly I don't think this was a terrible idea since to this article's conclusion, if you could reverse one you could reverse the other.

But this concept was insanely prevalent for ~20 years or so.

One of the biggest problems was not having enough ports. Some parallel port dongles tried to ignore communication with other dongles and actually had a port on the back; you'd make a "dongle snake" out of them. Once they moved to USB it was both easier and harder - you couldn't make the snake anymore, but you could ask people to use a hub when they ran out of ports.

P-CAD even had a dongle-caddy where you could plug in I think about 7 of them into to unlock different modules.

I will check if I can find an image of it.

EDIT: here is an old listing of it: https://www.ebay.com/itm/187748130737

Sadly the lid isn't open so you can't see what modules are installed.