Absolutely. It’s no small expenditure on a typical salary; for most people it’s a vacation you save up for. It’s just that there’s this meme that it’s exclusively for wealthy hedonists, and people support that by saying “it costs three hundred ninety dollars!!!” as if they think every other festival or con or whatever is a free charity event.
So, several years ago, there was a lot of gruff coming from attendees about a handful of super-rich jagoffs treating it as their own personal drug party, ignoring the rules and communities standards and pissing off everyone else. BoingBoing and others reported those stories, and a bunch of people who’d never heard of Burning Man before and weren’t really paying attention somehow jumped to the conclusion that everyone there was a rich jagoff. Even though they only knew about it because a bunch of the people there were complaining. It’s like if you told me about a racist getting kicked out of a local bar, and then I went around town saying everyone who drinks there is a racist.
And now it’s this self-sustaining meme. I have good friends who save all year to go to Burning Man and it’s basically the highlight of their year, so this annoys me.
