This is really not true in my experience. In fact, all my experience has been with products that aren’t THAT expensive, and the individual dev teams do decide. These are SaaS products, and sometimes the total cost is under $1000 a year, and I still can’t get prices without contacting sales.

Also, it isn’t just ICs. I have worked as a senior director, with a few dozen people reporting into me… and I still never want to talk to a sales person on the phone about a product. I want to be able to read the docs, try it out myself, maybe sign up for a small plan. Look, if you want to put the extras (support contracts, bulk discounts, contracting help, etc) behind a sales call, fine. But I need to be able to use your product at a basic level before I would ever do a sales call.