I think this is probably true. If you need a tool for your day job, your company ought to be paying for it. Some companies have slush funds for small purchases like books, but subscription costs for services would normally need to be approved. If you're a solo consultant then perhaps you'd pay for tools that make you more productive. But for personal projects the value-add would have to be pretty high to be paying another O($10-20) a month on top of other subscriptions.
The big group of "hobbyist" coders are students, and they get copilot for free via Github's very generous edu package (and so does anyone with an edu email address I think). The bigger problem is that this is a very expensive project. It's better suited to a big company with money to burn and deep pockets to give it away to junior devs who will evanglise for it at their new companies (e.g. students) for nothing. See Matlab.
