If it is worthwhile and not freely available, I will certainly pay. There are some great IDEs and tools that fit into this category.
>> We know now that free doesn't really work.
I suppose it depends on your needs, but I find using free tools such as zsh, vim, tmux, linux, and many others very valuable to me.
Watching their demo didn't help either. At most the behavior seems an incremental improvement over what Bash ships with in most distros, and it's not even clearly better than that (IMO worse, I prefer the trailing slash or color-coding that Bash uses to distinguish file/dir properties vs icons). Joke: Is the "perceived need" really just because macOS's default Bash distro has these features disabled?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash_(Unix_shell)#cite_note-60
There's so many great projects for bash and zsh add-ons like fzf.
But if their real product is the telemetry that also ships with it, and they've identified that many newbie developers have a hard time seeing through marketing pages directed at developers (eg like "webscale" stuff from mongodb circa 2010), then it, unfortunately, makes more sense.