"MCU break" services start at just under 1k$ and go up to a few k$ USD, the last time I checked. They're mostly based in the Far East (I'm not surprised at the author of this page) and while a lot of people may think "IP theft", they're very useful for right-to-repair, although at the higher end of the price range; if you have some old very expensive machinery to which the original company has long discontinued support or even no longer exists, the price doesn't seem so high anymore.
Functional expressions are not copyrightable. If I own a copy of the code you wrote, I am reasonably allowed to extract those purely functional expressions into my own work. Purely creative expressions are still protected by copyright. (This is why you cannot copyright an encryption key.)
When no “owner” exists, the licensing agreement is no longer valid. Copyright is a different issue. See above.
If the code is covered by patents, extracting it doesn't give you anything that reading the public patent wouldn't (if the patent was written as it should have been, to inform, and not obfuscated or ran through incomprehensible legal jargon).
And if it's a trade secret, then you relinquished it the moment you sold objects containing it. Though I realize DRM/anti-reverse engineering laws are trying to take away our right to examine how stuff works, they are absurdly immoral laws, and breaking them should never be described as "theft".
