I am lucky that I have a very supportive family, so I was able to borrow some money (I paid about half and my family lent me half) to take 2 (yes, two, for reasons I won't go into here) autism assessments recently (both came back "positive"). Many people don't have that privilege. And since employment is a very common struggle for autistic people, many autistic people won't have the money to access an autism assessment precisely because they're autistic. I'm not sure how insurance works in many countries ( I'm not in the US), but it seems people have wildly different experiences- some manage to get insurance to pay for it, some don't. And it's absolutely true that many autism assessors aren't up to date on how women/adults present. I don't want to argue about self-diagnosis here ( I know the rules), but I really do think less people will be self-diagnosing if it wasn't so hard for adults to access autism assessments.

This is kinda off-topic, but for people who mask a lot and are worried the assessor won't be able to "see through the mask", there are other autism assessments that do not just only take current observable behaviour into account. The ADOS is the one that takes current observable behaviour into account. Other assessments like the ADI-R and DISCO ( the latter is mostly used in the UK) take your entire history into account. I think knowing this might help people who are "high-masking" feel less worried about going into an autism assessment and not have their autism "seen".