Yes,
scalping is a business. As is everything you make profit from it.
Basically everything "limited" will be scalped from now on, like limited edition sneakers.
But the lower demand changed GPU scalping. Now the only profit is in scalping Founders Editions directly from AMD/Nvidia, since they are cheaper (more profit). Just check eBay.
PC Graphics Card Scalping Has Died Off (For Now)
If the resellers would lower their prices, their cards would again be scalped away, I guess.
So....I don't agree. It's based on a pedantic reason, but the two things are entirely different.
Let me suggest it this way. There are currently brands that make nothing. They take their label, slap it on a box from a manufacturer, and sell it at a higher price. The next item off of the production line is indistinguishable, labelled with a more generic name, and goes to the same exact stores with a 20-30% price decrease (if only that). That said, these middlemen are not viewed as scalpers...
The business model that you are looking for is non-value added intermediary sales. That's a business model where trivial differences equate to large price differences. Scalping is a process by which people buy a retail good, introduce a large fee, and sell to another consumer due to shortages in supply.
The fun bit here is that people don't seem to understand a lot of things. Step one is to manufacture an EUV machine...and only one company does that. That 250k or much more expensive machine is then sent to a factory. The factory purifies silicon wafers, manufactures them into chips with the EUV machine, and then packages them for further assembly. Once the chips are manufactured, you've got an entirely different stream for components. Chip + component + assembly = finished good. Literally anything from a delay in the EUV hardware, to any step of the component manufacturing and sourcing, can cause critical shortages...and people make it their business to utilize this disconnect between supply and demand to their advantage.
As to the point of scalping being a business model...it isn't. It's only a financial option with large amounts of capital and severe market imbalance. That said, all markets adjust. I don't see current GPU prices going down until there's a glut of some component...and AMD/Nvidia decide to try and steal market share from one another. Thing is, they've both realized that's bad for profitability. As long as they maintain rough costing bands at MSRP, they have a license to print money. Making it better for consumers, by competing, is unlikely to ever be half as profitable as the status quo. That said, it's not like the ARC GPUs are going to disrupt this....sigh....