Buying with the intent to "support the developer" doesn't make much sense to me. Unless you buy 1000 copies or something. At the scale even indies sell, 1 copy less or more makes zero difference.
And indie stuff will be on bundles for pocket change sooner or later.
As someone who has been "stealing" games (lol) for over 25 years, I've seen the path that the gaming industry has taken to reach where it is today. It's a path full of twists and turns, and a lot of those turns are due to the attitude that you just demonstrated toward games and their developers.
The blame isn't all on us, though.
The simple, core fact of the matter is that video games, in general, are overpriced. And developers/publishers/retailers, following human nature, realized that if they can sell a game for $20, they can also sell it for $40. And us consumers, following human nature, realized that if we can get it for less than $20, then we will. Especially since decades of experience has taught us that the odds of us getting away with copyright infringement are pretty good, particularly when it comes to video games.
But since games are, and always will be, a luxury product, there isn't as much pressure from society to keep the price fair as with necessities. We don't have any consumer protection groups, and we all remember the laughs we had from seeing the failed efforts of gamers trying to boycott a game or its developer.
So the whole thing has become a race: Developers and publishers trying to milk us for as much money as they can, and us depriving them of as much money as we can.
IIRC, piracy wasn't a thing until floppy drives and cassette drives were part of personal computers in the early 1980s. With the arrival of writable media, the need quickly arose for some kind of verification scheme so that people paid for the game instead of just copying it from a friend, so we were hit with manual lookups, copy protection sheets, codewheels, data encryption, bloated game development to make the games too big to pirate (yes, really), serial keys, on-disc DRM, online DRM, mandatory installation of third-party software, and finally the mandatory usage of third-party clients. And that's just to get people to buy the base game. Then there were the basic marketing ploys like limited shelf life, budget re-releases, compilation releases, data disks, optional expansion packs, add-ons, voice packs, shareware releases, mandatory expansion packs, the abandonment of physical retail copies, crowdfunding, DLC and finally Early Access - before the market went full ouroboros and has gone back to shunting games en masse to budget prices at the earliest possible convenience.
But it wasn't enough. It was never enough, and it never will be.
For all of these "locks" were made by humans, therefore humans can break them as well. That is why Denuvo will be cracked, and whatever will replace Denuvo will be cracked as well. The cycle goes on, the race continues.
But from my "tl;dr" comes a question: Could we gamers have done more to support our beloved developers? No, let me rephrase that question...
Should we gamers have done more?
EDIT: Text cleanup.