People forget how locked down the systems were until Borland and finally GNU gcc entered the market (Unless you went Masm or Pascal.) I remember the MS visual C++ and VB manuals with compilers were over $8k/seat at one point (would be almost twice that in today dollars).

People sometimes underestimate how important search engines are to build applications without official documentation.

Supporting FOSS is more than a convenience for some, as most remember locked ecosystems were not fun at any age. I remember GW-Basic and VB3.0 made building programs easy for kids, but it had other issues besides the license cost. Prior to Visual studio, making standalone binaries was simply too difficult for most until the Internet.

Now the average AAA game is around 40GiB on Steam, and g++/clang is the standard tool-suites. Fun times, =3

Most people either pirated Visual C/C++ or got GNU/Linux with tons of devel packages and amateur books (Learn C as if you were a freshman in College) or something like that.