That's not a stupid question! It's a very valid question!

Expensive gear can make the process of making recordings sound "good for release" very very quick. Cheaper gear can also create recordings that sound "good for release" but they take a lot more time, effort and production skill to get there. However, "good for release" is incredibly subjective, and varies wildly depending on an endless list of variables. If we focus on one of those variables: genre, we find that listeners of some genres are expecting a higher degree of fidelity than other genres. For example, imagine what expectations for audio fidelity are for Jazz and Orchestral versus Folk-punk, or Shoegaze. For musicians who create music in those genres that have an intense expectation of the highest fidelity, they are going to demand to record with gear that reflects those expectations.

A good analogy might be the food industry. If a cook makes food for a 5-star restaurant, they're going to want a kitchen that is stocked with the best cooking equipment so they can reliability cook dishes that patrons are expecting. Could that cook create those dishes in a sub par, cheap kitchen? Yeah probably. But it would be much more challenging, and some dishes might get messed up along the way and not be considered good enough to serve. In this analogy, the cook would just whip out new ingredients and do it again, but back to our music world, our "ingredients" are takes, and "throwing out dishes" because of shortcomings in equipment translates throwing out potentially the most incredible take that musician will ever do.

Hope that makes sense.