> I will never understand paying $50 for a font.

I will never understand people who expect fonts for free. They don't grow on trees. Font development is extremely involved, and I am happy to die on this particular elitist hill: the overwhelming majority of free fonts are absolutely rubbish, including the Liberation family, which is available by default on most Linux distros.

Any font that is free and is still reasonably good is almost certainly designed by a type foundry for a megacorp's branding and user interface (so, things like SF Pro, Segoe UI, Open/Noto Sans, Roboto, JetBrains Mono, IBM Plex, Source Sans, Fira Sans, Inter, etc), or are historic properties of the type foundries themselves, like Garamond, Helvetica, Didot, Minion, etc.

ASCII isn't the only set of characters. Just the LGK (Latin, Greek, Cyrillic) set of glyphs alone including combining marks, diacritics, contextual alternates and ligatures alone amount to several thousand glyphs, each of which has to be individually tuned for different weights, hinted for different display resolutions, hinted for RGB/BGR subpixel rendering, and more.