They explicitly target the universities as part of their business model. That’s why I say it’s a human capital Ponzi scheme. They give products out to students and educators way below cost, with the specific intention of making the field as a whole dependent on their products. This is well known and pretty explicit. If professors and students had to pay the same costs as private enterprise for esri products the demand for their products would plummet. This is their business strategy and it’s well known and more or less undisputed.

Whether or not they are a good company that provides quality, unparalleled products is not a point I’m contending. They are not competing on that alone. That’s my point.

As a systems engineer who was hired explicitly for a massive migration from 2 disparate ArcGIS Enterprise environments to an AWS one...

Yeah, there's a massive amount of essential features just missing from OSM and QGIS. Like, even the most basic - layers. They don't even really exist in OSM side of things. Whereas if I'm doing travel-time-bands from medical centers, I absolutely must use multiple boundary layers.

Then again, I'm an engineer, not a data scientist. My colleagues (all data scientists) do all sorts of crazy awesome work. Again, unless you're hacking R/python code and piecemeal it together, you're using ArcGIS. Then again, "ArcGIS Notebook" is a dockerized Jupiter system for doing just that in ArcGIS enterprise.

edit: As for me personally, since I'm working in geoinformatics, I've been teaching myself the hows and whats. Im pretty proficient at both ArcGIS and QGis, as I'm trying to learn them side by side.

If I am doing my own projects, I will use QGis. That's not even a discussion. I'm not about to use proprietary systems to lock up my data.

Try Krita - FOSS, excellent UI.