I think I found my answer!
I opened Matlab on the laptop and tried to activate it from within. It asked me to sign into my account and allowed me to pick from one of the two licenses there. I picked the individual one. Once the activation was done, I closed Matlab.
Then I turned off my network connections (wifi) and tried to start Matlab again. Normally and historically, that gave me an error and told me that it couldn't connect to the license server. However, this time around, there were no errors. Matlab started without any internet/intranet/Ethernet/network connections.
Just to be sure, I restarted the laptop and tried repeating the experiment again without any network/internet connections. It worked! I also checked the license file (network.lic) and what's written inside has changed too.