I think my journey though amps/modeling/etc. is a pretty common one among younger players these days. I started out on a 1x12 Marshall Valvestate combo - a hissy, cheap, piece of garbage but I didn't know any better as a kid. When I was a teenager I got a Line 6 POD and used that for YEARS. The pod led me down the rabbit hole of modeling, and over the years I tried pretty much every VST amp sim I could get my hands on (kazrog, guitar rig, amplitube, waves, you name it). So I didn't own or play any kind of "real" amp for years, tube or solid state, I just did everything in the box.
Eventually when I started working and actually had some money I managed to snag an AxeII on Reverb for wayyyy cheap, and pretty much felt like I'd reached the apex. As the OP alluded to though, I actually got some really bad GAS as A RESULT of having the Axe Fx, and a few months later ended up buying a block letter 5150 via craigslist. TBH I hardly ever play it, but I think I felt like I ought to own a proper tube amp if I was going to call myself a guitar player lol. So yeah, the tube amp was the very last thing to come, I've pretty much been on modelers all the way through.