My rule is that I start off with lower-mid-range equipment, until I know whether I actually like a hobby.
If you love cycling and you do it all the time? By all means spend $3000 on a high-end, premium-brand, ultra-light-weight bike, if you've got the disposable income and buying it would bring you joy.
But if you're just considering getting into cycling? There are perfectly good $500 bikes out there, and you don't need to delay getting into a sport just because you don't have $3k to spare right now.
There are in my country, sure. Brands like Pinnacle and Trek.
You're not going to be impressing anyone with an aluminium frame and Shimano's cheapest derailleur of course - but you also won't be scared to leave your bike chained up while you drop into a store.
And you might want to pick up lights, a lock, a helmet, and maybe mudguards, so you'll end up spending a bit more. And of course if you don't have the tools, time or inclination to do your own maintenance bike shops can get expensive.
One exception is rock climbing. I've been pressuring everyone around me to get off of rental shoes already, it makes the experience so much less painful and more pleasant...
The difference between nice and average gear in rock climbing is pretty slim. A few grams, smooth action on the moving parts... it's also primarily a failsafe, so it's inherently obvious that it won't help you climb dramatically better, any more than a nicer parachute will help you fly a plane better.
There's also a long tradition of the strongest climbers you know climbing on mank (i.e. safety gear so ragged it is terrifying to behold)
> There's also a long tradition of the strongest climbers you know climbing on mank (i.e. safety gear so ragged it is terrifying to behold)
It's not uncommon for trad climbers, or maybe it was. When I was younger I couldn't afford much, and I climbed with others in basically the same situation. My rack consisted of mostly passive protection, some nuts, some rocks (not literal rocks, i'm not that old). I eventually got a few micros and cheap cams (literally 3).. Some of the climbing I did back then was terrifying, not only because I was so new to it, and climbing relatively hard dangerous routes, but because they were made so much harder by having limited active protection, and a limited range of passive gear.
I got very very good at creative nut placement, threading the gnarliest of threads, and was very sparing with cams, trying to save them for only where it was completely impossible to place passive gear. I also got good at hanging on in uncomfortable positions for stupid amounts of time while trying to engineer a safe piece of protection out of very little.
In more recent years I added a couple totems (which are amazing, and amazingly expensive), and then got gifted a rack of cams the likes of which i've never seen. A lot of my trad climbs are feeling a hell of a lot easier now I can just chuck tons of cams with far less sparingly especially big crack climbs... It makes me wish I bought better gear earlier, maybe I would have been able to try a wider range of routes, but I'm also grateful for my hard earned skill of making the absolute best of poorly protected routes with passives, my opinion "well protected" is often very different from other peoples provided it's not literally blank run-out. And what others consider "unprotectable" I can often find perfectly safe protection on.
A very decent trad rack can be had for under £1000, and last a long time - In the scheme of things that's not a lot compared to most activities. I don't know why I'm still so frugal about it, I can afford it now. I feel like ropes are the most expensive part of climbing because you can go through them so quickly and have to buy new ones pretty much every year.
Nobody climbs actual rocks with rental shoes. There'd be nobody to rent them to you. Rental shoes are for gym climbing, which is quite a safe activity if you're not stupid or crazy.
Sometimes quality gear makes the entry process far, far less painful.