It is crazy for anyone making any amount. A $15k desktop is overkill for anything but the most demanding ML or 3D work loads, and the majority of the cost will be in GPUs or dedicated specialty hardware and software.

A developer using even the clunkiest IDE (Visual Studio - I'm still a fan and daily user, it's just the "least efficient") can get away without a dedicated graphics card, and only 32GB of ram.

No, it’s just a maxed out mac studio with 512gb unified ram. Nothing dedicated or specialty.

Honestly a huge chunk of it is the Apple internal SSD tax but who wants to wait for usb3 external i/o?

thats a crazy spend for sub-200k or even sub-500k

you're just building a gaming rig with a flimsy work-related justification.

I have a different computer for games and rarely have time to play them.