How about providing some facts instead of making it up as you go? Who's making less than $20k/year? Who can't afford to buy 16GB of RAM? It's $130 on Amazon.
I think I had this same conversation when someone told me that the average developer can't afford the $70 for Sublime Text.
I did, for the past five years, working as a Python dev in my country of origin (Portugal). And I occasionally went to interviews, and the offers were not better than what I already made, nor did most of my college friends make more than that.
You can imagine how much some developer from an actual poor country makes.
Who can't afford to buy 16GB of RAM? It's $130 on Amazon.
Prices are higher here, but in any case, that's the wrong question. Those $130 are worth much more to a person making $20k/m, or to a company paying that much, especially since many costs (not just hardware) don't drop with the salary levels (and in some cases are quite higher, e.g. gas prices), and so even the share of disposable income, not just the absolute value, is much lower. So it'd be absurd to waste that meager margin on RAM just to use a fancier editor.
If it's just a fancier editor then it's not worth investing any money into upgrading for anyone.
If you save 20 hours a year then it pays for itself. Everyone's economics are different, and the amount of time saved may be different. In the United States, you only need to save a few hours of work to make the upgrade worthwhile.
Fortunately, Atom is free so we can evaluate it to determine if it's worth the hardware upgrade.
I think I had this same conversation when someone told me that the average developer can't afford the $70 for Sublime Text.