If you edit using Visual Editor and compare that to the old wiki markup, you will understand. Visual Editor much faster esp. with automatic citation templates. My time is valuable (more than when I started as a poor college student) and my tolerance for bad UX has declined as technology in general has improved. And that's just one tool which has improved. There's an annual community wishlist survey: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_20...

And yes, it's reasonable. I work in tech as a software engineer and it's not as cheap as people think.