It's the same with music, I met so many guys with $2,000 guitars and the latest huge 175W amps and they couldn't play for shit or were retarded druggies, but thought they were the next Van Halen cause they had the latest meme guitar pedal. Best guys had a mid-tier guitar, shitty amps, and would play circles around everyone without a sweat.
People think they need to spend big on equipment to be taken seriously, it's like bro focus on your content first. You could be recording in a broom closet with a leaky ceiling and as long as it's good people won't care.
for everything but delay/reverb, you should get Chinese Amazon pedals. Everything Joyo "makes" (probably the same OEM as every other Chinese pedal brand) is dirt cheap and sounds fantastic. Or you can get one of those cheap multifx modeller things. And if you're in Europe, you can pick up Harley Benton guitars for like 100 euros and they're really good for what they are. No reason to spend more than 100 bucks on a pedal or 500 on a guitar.