How can I clone hard drive to ssd on Window 11?

I recently upgraded one of my two Gigabyte Windows 10 PCs because the hardware did not meet the requirements for Windows 11. I replaced the motherboard, CPU and RAM to be the same as my MSI Windows 11 PC. Initially I used a 1TB WD Black NVMe SSD and installed Windows 11 with a new key. Once working I installed my other programs and ensured everything was working. My data is stored on a separate HDD.

When I checked the 1TB System SSD I saw the used capacity was less than 100GB and realised that a 1TB SSD was a bit excessive, especially for creating a System disk backup. I bought a WD Black 500GB SSD and used Easus Disk Copy Pro to copy the working System disk. Disk Copy took care of resizing the System partition.

When I booted from the 500GB SSD everything appeared to work as it should but I noticed that Windows was not activated, it seems because Windows detected a hardware change (obviously the SSD change). I could not activate Windows simply by reentering the product key. I tried calling Microsoft Portugal (where I live) but the response was Portuguese (as expected), but so rapid I could not make sense of it. I raised a Service request with Microsoft for a call back but, seven days later I still haven't had a call.

Did I miss something? Is there a way to create a copy/backup of the System disk (with all installed programs) so that the Windows OS remains activated?