Yes, indeed, now is as it switched to OA, but it used to be much less, but it is paid from grants anyway, not from the own pocket. But the true new outrage is the review charge (~2K euro). Now, I mostly teach (don't want to write grants anymore), but when i published there last, there was no charge for review...it is quite ridiculous.
Arxiv is great (and very popular) for physics, much less so for Biology.
Holy goat fucking, I have been out of the business for awhile. The whole point was subscriptions (esp library subs) covered the cost of paper review, only the Open Access journals were charging review and publish fees. Didn't realize Nature and Science were doing it.
Times change. But as they say all God's creatures have to EAT.
I've published several articles in various scientific journals, the last one was in 2020. I never had to pay a cent! The only limit was the size of the article. If it exceeded a certain number of pages (I think the limit was about 10 pages of two-column format), then I would have to pay for the extra pages.
2000 € / review is outrageous!
Arxiv is great, Perelman published his proof of the Poincaré Conjecture there. Free, and served its purpose just fine.