It's seriously great you see it that way. I wish there were more people like you.
As a bootstrapper, I compare it to my other (eg. living) expenses. $70 feeds me for several days.
You mention IntelliJ. I use another JetBrains IDE: PyCharm. A two year subscription cost me $66. Sure, I will have to pay again in two years time. But I would argue PyCharm is much more powerful than ST.
That's no criticism of ST. It provides tremendous value and as I mention in the post, I did buy a license. But I don't think that most people consider $70 "personal pricing". I wish it were that way because I'm selling a (ST-inspired) desktop app myself [1]. But I don't think it is.
Compare, say, Intellij IDEA (does some things better, some things worse), which sells for several hundred dollars per year.