Here are some numbers on their user base in real number and dollar amounts: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/annualreport-2024/

Their tools are wildly popular in many spaces. It isn't for everyone though. It's totally believable in your circle no one uses their tools, but it isn't niche.

Funny enough, I know a lot of people who work at JetBrains, but only a few end-users.

Their use base is completely different. And we’re both in a bubble, I reckon. IntelliJ people also only know a few VSCode users!

Pycharm is extremely popular in the data science world. The Community Edition is free and has 99% of the features most people need. Even when developing with Cursor, I find myself going back to Pycharm just to use the debugger, which I greatly prefer to the debugger used in these VS Code forks.