> it's hard to get engineers making 6 figures to spend more than $50 on a tool they use every day of their working life.
On the flip-side, why invest all of your time become accustomed (possibly married) to an ecosystem that is beholden to someone else? Just because you spend $100 on VisualStudio doesn't mean that MS will take your input to heart when some manager "on high" decides to change direction with the product.
Depends on what are the alternatives: if there is an open alternative with the same features for free then sure use it, but if there is no alternative with the features you need then you have to invest your time/money to build that feature and very likely it's more time/money than to buy and learn an ecosystem.
If developers are currently using the OpenSource solutions, then they probably work for those people. Who are "you" to question what works for them and what features are a priority to them?
Many developers pay for close-source editors and IDEs, and the companies that support/develop them aren't necessarily going under. Heck BBEdit is still around despite falling out of favour as the de facto MacOS editor years ago.
Just within the Python ecosystem there are 2 or 3 IDEs that cater to Python developers despite the number of Python developers that prefer Vi(m) or Emacs.
The idea that developers don't or won't pay for an editor or that the OpenSource/Free alternatives are the equivalent of developers coding in Notepad on Windows just for save a few bucks is a false premise.
On the flip-side, why invest all of your time become accustomed (possibly married) to an ecosystem that is beholden to someone else? Just because you spend $100 on VisualStudio doesn't mean that MS will take your input to heart when some manager "on high" decides to change direction with the product.