I feel like everyone is missing the line that says “before it came out”. However, I find that hard to believe that 1 million people played a pirated copy before the release date and i can’t remember any leaked gameplay or screenshots.
They probably mean in regions it wasn’t available in yet, which is a key reason people would pirate. If they just made the game available everywhere then they wouldn’t have these problems.
Can’t even blame emulation as the main culprits playing it either with first gen switches being able to be jailbroken and hardware mods existing for current ones.