There were and are a lot of non-free ones, but since the 1990s, GCC and interpreted languages and Linux and Emacs and Eclipse and a bunch of kinda-IDEs were all free, and now VS Code is one of the highest marketshare IDEs, and those are all free. Also, the most used and learned programming language is JS, which doesn't need compilers in the first place.
And my point is that's simply not the case. Different products have always been not free, and continue to be not free. Recent example would be something like Unity, that is not entirely free, but has competitors, which are entirely free and open source. JetBrain is something someone else brought up.
Again: You have local LLMs and I have every expectation they will improve. What exactly are we complaining about? That people continue to build products that are not free and, gasp, other people will pay for them, as they always have?
There's never been anything stopping you from building your own
Soon there will be. The knowledge of how to do so will be locked behind LLMs, and other sources of knowledge will be rarer and harder to find as a result of everything switching to LLM use
How are LLMs equivalent? People posting their prompts on bulletin boards at cafes?
Since when? It starts with computers, the main tool and it's architecture not being free and goes from there. Major compilers used to not be free. Major IDEs used to not be free. For most things there were decent and (sometimes) superior free alternatives. The same is true for LLMs.
> The excuse "but you earn six figures, what' $200/month to you?" doesn't really capture the issue here.
That "excuse" could exactly capture the issue. It does not, because you chose to make it a weirder issue. Just as before: You will be free to either not use LLMs, or use open-source LLMs, or use paid LLMs. Just as before in the many categories that pertain to programming. It all comes at a cost, that you might be willing to pay and somebody else is free to really does not care that much about.