“I agree with the latter and that many students resort to plagiarism because they are in a bind, whether over their head or in a time crunch.”
Yup. I heard of an alleged case many years ago at a top university where the computer system was so slow that students couldn’t get their work done in a timely fashion, so a lot of them copied someone’s output (with the permission of that student). There were so many students with the same wrong answer to one question that one TA was marking the wrong answer as correct. In this case from what I heard no one got into trouble, and the problem that they were copying was an easy one, so that the reason to copy was just to avoid using the overloaded system.
Hopefully today this particular motivation doesn’t happen anymore with the widespread availability of compute power.
This does make one wonder how much cheating is going on, whether at universities or to get the grades to get into the top universities.