TLDR: windows does not charge to access the API that allows the application to change the cursors AND the amount of development work to display a custom cursor is minimal.
That's not true at all. In Windows there is a 'SetCursor' function in the User32.dll. Not only does it NOT require some kind of license code to be able to interact with the User32.dll, but it doesn't matter what programming language you are using, to change the cursor displayed on the user's screen, you have to use the User32.dll function.
Using this function you can tell it to set the cursor to one of the predefined / managed / native Windows Cursors - or you can create a custom cursor object from any image file. You then register that Cursor object in memory, and whenever you want to display that cursor object, you call the SetCursor function and send in a memory pointer to your custom cursor image.
Then in your UI code, you just monintor the mouse move event, you get the current location of the mouse and you just do a small bit of logic to determine if mouse is over "this area" then display cursor X, else if it is over "that area" then display cursor Y and so on. This is maybe a whole workday (8 hours) (at most) to handle cursors in your application code. It also takes non-development time to get a Graphics Designer to create your custom cursors - but even that should be a small amount of time. So at most this is a trivial task in any application anyone builds - especially a "professional" / commercial application like Adobe.
Your application code has access to the native cursors as well - meaning you don't have to use a custom cursor you created yourself, you can do SetCursor and point to the native cursor that meets your needs. In the application I build there's only one tiny area in all the software where none of the native cursors 'convey' the 'meaning' I want, so we use a custom cursor there. It's literally a line of code to load the cursor file into memory, then just a couple more lines of code that says 'mouse is over X, SetCursor = my custom cursor' and then 'mouse is no longer over X, SetCursor = default system cursor'.
So users here saying Adobe has wasted a bunch of time to set custom cursors, it's practically just a blip in time that they've spent on it. What's more baffling is the fact that won't spend a 'blip' of time to disable their custom cursor (or even provide a user option to use native cursors vs their cursors). Literally the code for that would boil down to:
1. If userCursorPreference = System, then call SetDisplayedSystemCursor(mouseLocation, cursorType)
2. If userCursorPreference = Adobe, then call SetDisplayedAbobeCursor(mouseLocation, cursorType)
Or something to that effect. Again, trivial amount of work.
I just upscaled and changed the color my cursor and went into my app and into the area that has the custom cursor, and without changing any code, my custom cursor is automatically upscaled. It's ignoring the windows cursor color, but at least it's huge - and I had to change nothing. Now in my application, we took the graphic designed image (I want to say our base was PNG file), and then created a '.cur' file - this is a special image file type specifically for Cursor images. Creating custom cursor files was also minimal effort: you can find plenty of free / non-free applications / websites that can load a image file and spit a cursor file. So when I say minmal effort, way back when, I just used some 3rd party app to generate the cursor file - took all of 5 minutes.
I am guessing the reason my custom cursor scales correctly & automatically is because that's the file I am loading into memory. If I were to instead load a BMP file or something of that nature, it may not scale automatically. I'd have to experiment.
Either that or Adobe is actively making their cursor ignore the Windows setting. That actually seems like that'd be way more work. My guess is they are just not using .cur files and instead standard image files which are rendering at their fixed width & height.
To honor the custom user color, I'd probably have to get the user's cursor color from the Windows Registry, then generate a custom .cur file based on my base file where I replace the white color portion with the user's color portion, and then load that into memory.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/nf-winuser-setcursor
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/nf-winuser-loadcursorfromfilew
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/63287678/extract-cursor-size-via-winapi-windows-10
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