It is more like 20–50k in average, 100–200k for high end fonts from the biggest foundries. I single handedly made an Arabic typeface, 4 styles, ~5000 glyph each (that is perceived by many as a high quality font) over the course of 4 years as a side project most of time. Type design is hard, but making good fonts is no harder that writing good software, it is just a niché market with relatively few professionals.