>>11546875
For me the way to get over any shame/guilt related to wasting money on toy collecting is to make it more of an active hobby and less of an exercise in expensive hording. I love vintage toys, especially lines that have interesting engineering and stylistic designs but its hard to justify the ongoing cost when this shit literally just sits in a cabinet for me to admire. About 3 years ago I started selling off my old card collections and started buying up large/complete vintage toy collections for a discount; cleaning them down, matching accessories, took decent photos of them and started selling them individually online and at collector markets. At the same time I would cherry pick nice pieces for my own collection. This has been self sustaining or profitable ever since while also being quite fun to do (mostly).
I think as long as you're doing something creative or profitable with your hobby you wont experience the retrospective regret and shame of wasting money on it. People will also have some respect for it (if you really care about that).