It was expensive enough getting hard drives in those days! My first, an Amiga 500, didn’t have a HD, but I did have two floppy drives and and whopping 512kb of RAM, giving me one of the hottest computers in the barracks back in 1990.
My second was a 3000, to which I added a “huge” 50 mb hard drive. 
The toaster was always the dream, but I never managed to save enough for it.
I’m guessing the “everyone had ONE friend with Video Toaster” statement was something along the line of how everybody had a friend that had “an uncle that worked at Nintendo”.
That’s how I interpreted it as well. We all had that one Amiga friend who wouldn’t freaking shut up about it. Now I realize I was secretly jealous and am thinking about buying an Amiga now. 
But yah, all the Amiga people knew about the video toaster and always seemed to claim to have a friend who had one. I think mostly that meant “saw one in a computer store”.
I first saw a Video Toaster in a trade magazine while I was working at a cable access station in Fargo. I showed the advertisement to a friend, and said something along the lines of, “This is going to change everything.” For me, it did. A few months later, that friend called me up and said, “I just bought a couple of those Toasters. Come run them for me.”
And so I started my career as a industrial video editor working in a barn. Soon, clients wanted 3d work, so I learned Lightwave. I wrote a bunch of tools in LScript. I joined the most excellent Lightwave Listserv (Chromecow here. Hi!) and met some awesome folks. I’ve been a game designer for the past 20 years, but the Toaster got me my start, and got me out of Fargo.
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