Not to sound flippant or pretentious, but for me, $40 is practically free for a software tool. On top of that, I can expense licenses if I use them for my work. I’m guessing that most people in my position would have no problem paying $40 for a font.

It's still a bit much IMO. It reminds me of Sublime Text being priced at $70 or Input Mono being $40-100+ depending on the options you choose.

I assume they are willing to accept the risk of piracy and/or lost sales to free alternatives like Fira Code, and plan to make their money on institutional licenses instead.

I would bet that most who wouldn’t buy Sublime at $70 wouldn’t buy it at $35 either. If you’re paying for text editors and fonts they’re probably important enough to you that you probably won’t let price deter you unless it’s truly exorbitant.

Personally speaking I’m a bit more spendy on small dev products because I know it’s harder for them to stay afloat, unlike Jetbrains or Adobe which aren’t really impacted by my purchase decisions in any meaningful way.

I am not saying you are wrong but to me the real problem is death of a thousand cuts problem: I have zero issues paying for quality work and I do; but when these things start piling up -- fonts, images, logos/icons, IDEs, creative software -- you can easily find yourself spending $1000.

I am not stingy but I feel drowned in a sea of good work each requiring its payment. This phenomena turned me off paying for fonts and settling for free ones.