Not only shitty, it's dumb. Even Adobe knows to give students hefty discounts. It's how they get new users on the hook.

On my uni we also had licenses, their ratio per students were somethibg like 1:10.

The uni doesnt care. The software vendor does and is threatening the uni for not being compliant.

Also kinda shitty of those companies to charge educational instutions

It really is, but what can do? Capitalism exploits everything for profit.

Some software uses license servers where each client is supposed to request a seat temporarily. If more people use it at once than seats were licenses they detect that with phone home features. We had that with Matlab I believe, if you tried using it in the most popular time you might not be able to.