I have seen plenty of people putting up huge barriers of entry for themselfes before trying out a new hobby
Oh yeah my mom is just like that. She wants to try out stuff, but doesn’t because getting into any hobby is “expensive” and she won’t put the cost upfront before knowing if she’ll like it or not. And she ends up doing nothing. She’s retired and does absolutely nothing. It’s heartbreaking. And I can’t event convince her that if she wants to try out something, she could either ask for stuff on christmas/birthdays or go for a cheap, janky setup first and upgrade later.
Although gatekeeping is a bad attitude, I think the worst part of beginning a hobby is not getting super expensive gear as a beginner, but getting the wrong super expensive gear as a beginner.
As a homebrewer, my super janky setup has barely evolved in the 8 years I’ve been in the hobby. It’s a very hands-on process, hard to control for temps and most of my tools are either upcycled or built from hardware store materials, but I know exactly how it works and can let my imagination run wild when creating recipes. Plus, it’s fun to spend an afternoon with friends drinking beer while actually brewing beer. I see a lot of people splurging for a Brewfather and losing interest pretty quickly because everything is automated, so your “hobby” is mainly waiting for a timer to beep, or people “investing” in kits and making barely-better-than-low-end commercial beer.
I’m not really into photography anymore but when I started out, I was shooting film because camera bodies were super cheap back then, people discarded them because they were only interested in the lenses. People were buying 800-1000€ m4/3 cameras in droves and put expensive vintage lenses on them to get that “instagram look”, which is useless except for driving up the price of good lenses because the sensor is so small that most of the character of the lens is lost. With a bit of patience, you could snag a full-frame, used Sony a7 for less money and actually getting what you paid for in the lens.