I'm a guy starting my own deep learning startup in my living room. I'm not associated with a university, and I barely make enough money to live off of. There's numerous papers that are relevant to what I'm working on, and at $30 a pop, that adds up quickly. Furthermore, the abstract for a paper is sometimes so vague that you don't know if it is relevant until you read half way through it.

Also, I am diabetic. Pretty much everything in pop science says to eat complex carbs, and avoid fats and simple sugars. There are a number of papers that talk about the benefits of a low carb and high fat diet, but they're behind a paywall.

So it's more than just a small specialist community that consumes scientific literature.