Huh?
While I suppose that one "could" pay for Emacs, the vast majority of users never have.
Then again, I've only been using Emacs for 45 years, so I'm a newbie. (Yes, I started with the Teco implementation.)
> Joy also claims that most of vi's popularity came from the fact that it was readily available and bundled with BSD, while other editors, like Emacs, could cost hundreds of dollars.
Joy was referring to the late 1970s early 80s here and in the context of making VI available when he created BSD and published it for free. Unix operating systems were not freely available outside academia back then.