Groups making cracks for high profile games that stay secret for up to a year or longer makes no sense, any single leak would mean it would spread across the net like wildfire due to demand. You can't both say that something is so secret that the most public scene doesn't know about it, yet also claim that it's something we can find it if we look. Because people more engaged in the scene would make it public asap. If any TPU-poster could find proof of this, then anyone on reddit, etc, could as well.
It only takes 1 person who posts it to reddit for the upvotes and gold dopamine hit to spread the crack, after all.
On top of that, if your claim is right, then that still supports my original post on DRM being effective:
If only shadowy, private cracking groups that never go public crack the games at release, and the public mainstream scene doesn't get it, then that is the same as a game being uncracked in practice.
The point of DRM is after all to make (illegal) redistribution of a game impractical, or slow the process down to encourage game sales. (In theory, anyhow.)
If RDR2 was cracked 2-3 days after release, but so few people has access to the crack that it wasn't publicly known, and the public mainstream scene didn't get the crack until a year later, then that's the same as the DRM holding up for a year. (In which case it was complex enough that somehow only shadowy, private groups managed to break it, but none of the mainstream groups.)
After all, it's reasonable to assume that the majority of people pirating titles would be doing it through the most mainstream and public channels.