It's not really about the cost. It's about the principle of having to pay any amount of money to be able to do development work at all with your preferred choice of OS/editor.

Attaching a price to your ability to onboard a language with your favorite workflow changes how you view that language and the motives of its maintainers when compared to the alternatives for that platform. Java has no such barrier to adoption on Linux, for example, because IntelliJ happens to have a community edition.

> It's about the principle of having to pay any amount of money to be able to do development work at all with your preferred choice of OS/editor.

Are you paid for your work? Why shouldn't the developers of development tools be?

Visual Studio also has a community edition.

Visual Studio's community edition is something entirely different from IntelliJ's community edition. IntelliJ is open source[1] but Visual Studio is proprietary with tricky license terms[2] that limit it to companies of a certain size, among other things.

[1] https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community

[2] https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/license-terms/mlt031819/