Flying sim community is the one with huge $$$
Yes, but it is also very small. DCS has ~1000 peak concurrent users. Same for Train Simulator. That's not $80m revenue per year user levels even if they do spend way more money than your average gamer.
Eagle Dynamics that develops DCS has 55 employees. Cloud Imperium has 1,100 employees plus third-party subcontractors. That's a bit over a half of the number of employees of Rockstar Games.
This is way beyond the sustainability levels of turbo autists who build $7k cockpits for their planes at home (last video) and Starfield is way closer to the original Roberts games than what SC seems to be.
Let's just do some basic math. Legatus package costs $40k. That means that it would take 2,000 turbo autists buying Legatus package in 2022 to generate SC's revenue. If we are very generous, maybe you can do that for 1, 2, 3 years, but eventually you will just run out of the very small cross-section of turbo autists who a.) like space games, b.) like sims of vehicles that don't even exists*, c.) like games that are in pre-pre-alpha, and lastly d.) have a spare $40k to spend on it.
You need normie money for that revenue.
* This is a big one btw, because if you've ever played a flight/tank/whatever sim, people are generally very dismissive of the inclusion of paper planes/tanks/whatever. Everything in SC is paper. Let's also be honest here, SC does not simulate shit. Orbital re-entry and aerodynamics are just magic in that game, as is probably the majority of other mechanics beyond having to apply thrusters to stop in space. That's literally the only thing it "simulates".