> I find it hard to believe that there is a demographic of people that were yearning to write code, but simply could not because they lacked LLMs. Is it the price?

Yes, because the price is measured in time.

With LLM tooling I’ve churned out idiosyncratic tools that fit my use cases quickly. Takes maybe a day instead of a week. A week instead of months. The fast turnaround changes the economics of writing custom tools for myself.