Why do we have to pirate the game if we want to play on older versions? I thought GoG was a bit of an archive, or was i mistaken?

There is a page called Gogdb.org that has "everything" as far as I can see. I am not sure how it affiliates to GoG, but it's not possible to download content not already owned on GoG. And any purchase links goes to the official GoG product page.

I'm not sure whether it's possible to get old patch data off there though (I download and store everything that I want locally anyway), but you can give it a try.
https://www.gogdb.org/product/1423049311#builds

Thanks, but i already know of the site and you can't download old patches that way. I'm just unable to understand the decision to remove all of those older patches, despite still keeping up patch notes on their own Cyberpunk site and i can't get any answer from GoG about why they are doing this.

Like, i have the game, i bought the physical pre-order, so why can't i play the way i want to play? Why does GoG have to go the same way as Steam or Epic?

Storage space would be my guess. I got everything from Cyberpunk 1.03 (installer) and onwards in patches. That's 300 GB alone.

I got 100 GoG games kept locally, and that's not even all my GoG games - and FAR from the entire GoG library - and only those games, including patches and mods and extras, amounts to 1.11 TB.

It makes sense they only keep the last few patches available to save space, which is a simple enough reason.
But not just admitting that and replying to an inquiry regarding the issue is rude of them.

Note that it takes WEEKS to get a response to support tickets now though. There's a sticky post on the main forum page regarding this.

EDIT message cancelled.

This is the list of GOG Galaxy builds. Most of them are available to download through Galaxy. Downloading older versions is a feature of Galaxy client.
Then you can backup it to zipped archive. Its still DRM-free for almost all GOG Galaxy builds games (and for Cyberpunk, although you should start it directly from win64\cyberpunk2077.exe).

Patches are randomised. Sometimes there is ones that is outdated and still available, while there is no and never actual patch installer (from outdated to outdated only patch).
.....
If you still want to download offline patches
http://www.gog.com/forum/cyberpunk_2077/downgrading_the_game_without_drm_without_galaxy/post6
But using GOG Galaxy is most easy available way.

Sorry for the late reply.

Yes, i know i can download older patches, but not ALL of them. I can't go back to, for example, 1.21, because those patches are no longer available to download even from Galaxy. My question was why can't i just play how i want to play without having to resort to downloading versions of the game from torrents or other dubious sources?

Because that never be avaialble in gaming. And now host every patches cost too much size. Few people will need them, even for games that on version about 1.2 (or 0.1.2) have unique content.

And almost every game have unique content in 1.x versions (still need some patches, so aroud 1.1-1.2). By one side, its mostly for older games. By toher - it even more actual for digital distribution, cause of Early Access games. They all have unique content in 0.x.x build.

And it always up to you how you find that versions. As answer to topic question - because they out of date. You forced to use third party source for full game installer 1.0 and for older patches. Nothing you can do with it.

Money, basically. Storage space costs money and, like PaladinNO wrote, patches add up to a lot of storage space. So GOG pitches all but the latest ones to save themselves some expenses.

Now, is this right? I don't think so. I think if you paid for a game, you should have access to every iteration of that game. Unfortunately what I think and what GOG makes policy don't exactly align...