As pointed out in another comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068986 ), the people who know sed and vim are likely to be power users, which are a really small part of the populace.
Sure, there are text replace tools within most programs, but that doesn't mean that even half of the people using computers will know how to use them, or will ever bother to learn, when there are alternatives available. To that end, it makes sense to optimize for either of the easiest approaches, be it either using basic keyboard commands or the mouse.
That's also why GUIs are more popular for personal computing, as opposed to CLIs, or TUIs. Of course, CLIs could also be improved ( think tar vs docker UX, which can be achieved with something like https://typer.tiangolo.com/ ) and TUIs are also somewhat underused (nmtui, ncdu and many others are great pieces of software).
As for the actual amount of money spent - that is indeed a "yikes", how does someone even spend so much?
