I've had a (probably wrong) take on the ridiculous direction modern GPUs have gone, that isn't just because of crypto mining, ridiculous profit margins and machine learning. From when I got into the hobby until the release of the PS5 and whatever Xbox competed with it, if you built a PC at a similar budget to a console, it would consistently outperform it. The PC I built 8 years ago has started showing its age but in its prime was about 1½ times the cost of a console for triple the power, now 1½ the cost of a console more or less gets you a console.

Part of that is the horrendous inflation of PC parts, particularly the GPUs, but also that the hobby has shifted away from being competitive against consoles to having no chance of being cost competitive. When they stopped being in competing fields, the cost of PC parts just exploded.