The amount of people who are willing to pay $1500 for high-quality VR hardware is not a huge market, but a rabid one filled with enthusiasts and early adopters. It's likely enough to fund research into how to produce a more mass market solution.
The amount of people in the first group who are willing to pay for a device that requires you to tie every single action and usage into Meta's data-pipeline Hoover of personal information is likely near zero.