We are incredibly lucky, you could build a studio of nothing but budget gear and it will sound as good as multimillion pound professional studios from the past. Even budget microphones are 99% as good as the best, only “super ears” can really tell the difference, same for pre-amps plus almost any “flavour” can be emulated. Most listeners just don’t care anyway.
I engineered and produced an album for an artist at the end of 2018 and we thought a track we worked on decades ago would fit the album. We were about to re-record it but then I found a copy of the original VST32 project on an old hard-drive, converted it to SX format then opened it in CB9. Back then I had a gaming sound blaster and a AKG CS1000S - that was it. Listening individually, the vocal and acoustic guitar tracks were incredibly noisy, mains hum plus bleed into the card from the PC internals and the CS1000S wasn’t very flat. By the time I eq’d everything and mixed the vocal in with the rest of the 20 year old 16 bit 44.1 track, it sounded fine. Back then, I was migrating from a knackered Tascam 4 track with hiss from hell, so having 32 (noisy!) 16 bit tracks were a revelation to me! Only 1 in 10,000 people will notice sound quality beyond a certain point of acceptability - and modern budget gear is well, well beyond that point. Don’t get me wrong - I love gear and would have all top-end gear if I had a spare 100K, but you really are spending well past the point of diminishing returns. Obviously with RME you’re buying rock solid drivers and support - which is worth more than sound quality alone.