It's a spectrum. Not every professional wants and/or can afford the top end cards. Many professionals (i.e. those who make money doing a thing) have been using high-end gaming cards for work pretty much since they existed. There's also the long-running debate as to the actual value of the 'pro' line of video cards for non-mission critical purposes (enough of one that nVidia in their license prohibited the use of gaming cards in servers with the odd exception of crypto mining)
But they are the low-to-mid segment of professionals doing weddings and local business presentations with median income around $50k. The ones doing interesting work can't live without real 10-bit HDR on calibrated 4k screens for realistic printing/video projections, without proper 5k+ RAW cameras and top-end lens etc. and those are extremely expensive.
Every self-declared "professional" I've met spent most of their time unproductively fiddling with their equipment.
While a select few can push the envelope with technology alone, a bit of talent seems to easily compensate for almost any technological limitations. The "latest and greatest" is the easy route to mediocracy.
That's been true for all creative disciplines: from photography to writing to animation. There might even be a mechanism, where inferior (or at least different) tools may be a restriction that nurtures creativity, or at least guarantees results that are easily distinguished from the rest of the market.
>But they are the low-to-mid segment of professionals doing weddings and local business presentations with median income around $50k
Yeah, tell that to the Octane Render community. There's plenty of incredible starving artists using consumer GPUs in their workflow to render top-notch work.
These expensive items are actually useful equipment for video production, but it doesn't mean a video card has the same importance. Who cares about slightly longer rendering times for rarely used special effects?
