I don't know about "recent"... demos for their own sake had clearly splintered off of the cracking scene by 1991, 35 years ago.

exactly, I got into the scene in the mid 90s and none of us was into cracking at all. I mean, if you have the skills to code a demo you could probably crack most software, but at that point it was about taking a hardware and making it do what most thought wasn't possible.