The rate of development since V6 is crazy fast IMO. Very much an OSS success story.
We saw something similar with Blender. At a certain point it becomes good enough that for some professionals it becomes a viable alternative to its obscenely expensive proprietary competition. If those companies are willing to donate $500 / seat / year to OSS instead of spending $1500 / seat / year on proprietary licensing, they can get some developer to fix the main issues they run into. This in turn means the OSS variant gets even better, which means even more companies are willing to consider switching, which means even more budget for development. Let this continue for a few years, and the OSS alternative has suddenly become best-in-class.
Sure, if you're routing 8+ layer boards with blind vias and PCIx16 and DDR5 buses every day, go buy an Allegro or Expedition licence for 6 figures. It's absolutely worth the money.
For Altium, I find that the "showstopper bug that Altium has":"feature that Kicad doesn't have" ratio is almost always strongly in favor of Kicad.