If I were an indie game dev, I'd rather pay for hardware resources than Unity license fees. It's $2K/year even if you're not making money yet. There is a free version but it's heavily limited (no physics, no VR).

Unity is free, can publish for free, it includes physics.

Unity is not free if you're part of a team that has made $100k in the last 12 months. Including funds raised.

Unreal is free, per project, until that specific project has earned over $1M in revenues.

Epic probably does expect the indie devs to have laptops, yes.