Most people don't make purchasing decisions based on the value they create but rather based on some ingrained assumptions about how expensive software is supposed to be. VSCode and many other complex pieces of software are free, autocomplete is built into my OS, and those subscription consumer software that does have a price usually are priced very low—so relative to those, $10/month feels like a lot (even though I hope that practically anything anyone makes the effort to subscribe to produces at least $10 of value for them).

Some companies seem to be leaning into higher subscription pricing (Superhuman and Motion come to mind) and almost certainly produce far more value than their subscriptions cost if you ask me, but there's definitely a mental barrier to value based pricing to consumers, as well as the fact that with so many companies offering cheap/free software, the market isn't solely determined by value created but rather comparison against other software.

You'd think "very smart" programmers would be equipped to do basic cost/benefit analysis. If it costs $900 and provides $1000 in value, that's $100 more than not buying it.

It depends if as a employee, your working time stays the same.

If you’re an employee your company should pay for it. If not, find a better employer!

You'd think "very smart" programmers would be equipped to consider additional factors such as the cost of getting reliant on a tool controlled by a single vendor as well as the effects on other things that they care about. You'd think they also understand that people are not machines and reducing a task by a certain time does not neccessarily mean that they can get that much more work more done overall.

If the amortized benefit is less than one minute per month, then it's probably best to simply pass instead of hoping for a price adjustment.

What proportion of people are making $1 per minute?

$1 per minute is approximately $120k annual salary, so... almost anybody doing software development in the US?

That's not true. The median annual pay for a software engineer in the US is a bit under $100k. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes good data on this.) That means most people doing software development in the US are making under $100k.

Almost anybody doing software development at a well-funded tech company is going to be making over $120k/yr, yes. But it turns out there are lots of other kinds of programming jobs, too.

And the USA is what, 4% of the world population?