D&D has been around for so long that you can easily play without giving a cent to Wizards of the Coast. However, I still definitely think having people try more options is good.
Unless you want to play with no book, no minis, no map, and a completely home-brewed campaign with all bespoke characters and stories.
At that point, you aren't playing the same game that everyone else is. Wizards has got their fingers in every slice of this pie. Even if you buy D&D stories written by someone else, you're still paying license to Wizards. When you buy a mini, you pay license to Wizards.
Maps - you can print them for free (minus ink & paper costs), you can draw your own, you can use maps from other games. Even if you're playing a published adventure, you can still find maps for free online.
Books - you can pick them up second-hand, you can pirate them, you can borrow them. I also never fully understood the stigma against home-brewed campaigns - I strongly prefer both playing & running homebrew.
I already owned a 5e players handbook but there's no reoccurring money going to wizards here and we run a biweekly 5e campaign.
If you aren't concerned about legality, all the books are readily available without paying wizards (heck, most of the recent ones and many of the older ones are also legally available that way in deas tree form in the secondhand market); you can buy miniatures that aren't specifically D&D licensed (lots of people use them in playing D&D, whether alone or mixed with licensed D&D minis; it has no effect one way or the other on the game), there are plenty of D&D-compatible maps with no licensing relationship to Wizards. Its very easy to play D&D without paying Wizards.
Honestly, with some of the books they've published for 5e, you're probably still half-way to homebrew if you do pay them. It's pretty frustrating that there's such huge holes in a lot of the first-party content. And we've been having a lot of fun drawing on dry-erase battle maps and paper minis.