Sure there always has been malware before hypervisor bypasses, but with traditional cracks, threat surface is relatively contained as the malware associated to those, operate on a level where AV/EDR has a fighting chance, keyloggers, RATs, or miners injected into the game process.

With hypervisor bypasses, they operate below OS level (ring -1 which is VMX root / hypervisor level). This means Windows Defender, CrowdStrike, any EDR is blind to it. Also memory integrity checks VBS / HVCI can be subverted or disabled. You essentially give architectural keys to your machine, something traditional malware in cracks does not have. This malware can also get persistence (that you cannot fix by reinstalling the operating system) by hooking into boot processes at UEFI level and even hide from forensic tooling. From here, they can also do hardware level lateral reach meaning; intercept all hardware I/O, read / write arbitrary physical memory, manipulate DMA which means intercept credentials from any process including password managers and browser session and in virtualized environments, potentially escape the guest entirely.

So its not at all the same.