This is the new industry standard connector proposed, designed, and adopted by the PCI-SIG and its members. AMD, Intel AND Nvidia are members of this board, so there's no shifting the blame towards other companies to protect either of them. They have all agreed upon it, pitched it to power supply manufacturers and built an entire spec around it. It will not go away. Nvidia simply implemented it first, AMD will do it in the next generation, if anything, attempting to capitalize on the widely publicized failures of the connector that the 4090 exposed they decided to market that their cards had the old connectors instead - truth being, the design had long been finalized at that point. There's no use kidding yourselves.
There's a trend here that has been going unchecked for some time which is senseless hatred of Nvidia and it needs to stop. It's not productive. It's not helpful. It does nothing but show bitterness, and bitterness that I argue is misdirected: instead, put the effort towards demanding AMD release something decent, they haven't released something that was truly ahead of the competition in performance, features, software, power consumption, thermals... practically everything since the HD 5870.
They don't need to be protected. They need to be harshly criticized and viciously outed. Scream in demand of better products. Better support. Better maintenance. Better prices. Better everything. It's a multi-billion-dollar corporation, not the small town mom n' pop vendor. This image that AMD is an underdog under constant threat from much larger, anti-competitive companies such as Intel and Nvidia has to go. It's not founded in reality any longer.
Right now, AMD discontinues less than 5 year old GPUs and no one seems to care. Nvidia supports them for 10 years, and they're evil and greedy. Just... stop this nonsense already.