Comment by MSFT_Edging

Basic Vivado is the bare minimum to develop for their hardware. A large amount of functionality is still locked away behind paid IP.

Most of the revenue comes from the IP cores.

A common business model for companies like this is to enable developers to learn their tools cheaply, so that when they develop something for their employer, they're more likely to reach for those tools/ecosystems and have the employer pay for those tools.

This just cuts out beginner/hobbyist FPGA devs from using industry standard tooling.