You have quite a biased sample because most people are not going to suffer going to remote parts of Scotland to look for birds, so you are only seeing the more devoted birdwatchers.

Birdwatching can still be enjoyed in most places without needing to travel far. Birds are less active in bad weather so you don’t need expensive outdoor gear, and in many places there will be freely accessible nature reserves with hides in which one can sit in shelter to watch birds.

The highest quality glass is going to get pretty expensive (camera lenses can get to the region of $20k; binoculars $4k or so) but there are also much cheaper options and often these can be quite reasonable: you don’t need to take photos of birds; a superzoom point-and-shoot can work great; more expensive binoculars make a bigger difference in low light and if you’re young (older people’s pupils won’t dilate as much so bigger objectives at a lower magnification won’t be a huge help).

I feel like mostly you’re observing that rich people spend lots of money on their hobbies and not that opening your eyes to look at birds is some expensive exclusionary activity.

Even better, older Nikon DSLRs are now cheap with many F-mount lenses being incredibly cheap versus buying new mirrorless gear and lenses.

M43 systems are also excellent for bird watching given the 2x crop factor, and diminutive size of lenses verses larger sensors. Older M43 camera bodies are incredibly cheap versus new equipment. M43 combined with modern LLM-based denoisers means that even low-light photos with higher ISO really can end up looking incredibly good.

No need to go far or spend a lot of money.