Were that the case, there would have been nobody buying Starlink.

As they are, I think you are wrong.

My neighborhood has both cable and fiber, both >= 1Gbps, fairly cheap

My neighbor has starlink. I assume because they are MAGA.

You mean privileged people in developed countries had it. Billions of people did not.

I’ve seen the first hand impact of starlink in communities that before had dialup as the fastest option from Australia to Tunisia to remote arctic Canada.

Medical stuff, school, talking to loved ones.

Not everyone lives within a metro that has good infrastructure. This is even more true in developing countries.

More tech people need to go places.

I was living in the eastern Caribbean ten years ago (a place that is not particularly poor), and the number of web services that could not handle a slow or unreliable connection was kind of shocking. Netflix was actually pretty impressive, they were fine to about 500kb/s with a lot of dropped packets. Below that, they were slow, but by no means unreliable. Most other sites would shit the bed on a similar connection.

Starlink has been an absolute godsend for my friends that are still down there.