Certainly, by the time you are piloting for Air France, you'll have had so much training and experience that whether you used a flight simulator before getting your first pilot's license is irrelevant.
Not to mention that the flight simulators for large passenger aircraft are far more advanced than anything you can buy as a consumer, let alone download to a PC. Their physics simulations are advanced enough to use in crash investigations to simulate possible failure scenarios. Their use in training airline pilots is mandatory, not detrimental.
It costs at least $1.5 million. It's ~150x cheaper than the plane and since zero lives at risk, US airline pilots are required to train emergencies in simulators while being accessed by an examiner every six months (IIRC).
For general aviation though, nothing that powerful is available, but you can log training hours on an FAA-certified simulator running the pro version of X-plane.
I’m fairly certain most of the cost there is in the machinery. The software should be more or less comparable (there’s no reason for it not to be anyway).
> I’m fairly certain most of the cost there is in the machinery.
Why are you so certain?
While the hardware isn't exactly cheap, neither is the software. Gathering feedback from a bunch of pilots and incorporating it into the simulator isn't cheap. Renting out an A330 and a couple of pilots to run experimental validation isn't cheap - it costs >$50k an hour and you'll need hundreds if not thousands of hours. Validating each software release isn't cheap.
*> The software should be more or less comparable (there’s no reason for it not to be anyway).
I'm working on second hand info but AFAIK it takes over a dozen modern networked server systems to provide the fidelity the simulators need (with multiple GPUs no less). The software isn't comparable simply because a consumer machine isn't powerful enough to run the real stuff and the quality of the simulators has absolutely sky rocketed in the last 20 years. The've been constantly upgraded to the point that a 747 simulator now costs more than the plane itself.
This is what a full motion flight simulator for the aforementioned A330 looks like: https://www.afgsim.com/wp-content/uploads/A330_CEO_Madrid_-5...
It costs at least $1.5 million. It's ~150x cheaper than the plane and since zero lives at risk, US airline pilots are required to train emergencies in simulators while being accessed by an examiner every six months (IIRC).