It's dirt cheap to host text contributed by volunteers compared to audiovisual media or newspapers written by paid people

Which is not to say free and without challenges, definitely not at Wikipedia's scale, but compared to how much donation money they get it's peanuts, not even the same ballpark (the vast majority of the money they get via Wikipedian beg banners goes to projects other than Wikipedia)

Also, personal opinion but

> I haven’t opened Wikipedia in years.

sounded like someone proudly telling a group of supposedly cool friends how they don't read stuffy books anymore now that they've discovered one-page summaries online. This might fall on deaf ears but there's value in reading the actual thing including following references where relevant