Nvidia sure is doing their best to sell severely overpriced products, but, the practice of using the same die for multiple variants is perfectly valid. AMD is doing it , Intel is doing it , literately everyone else is doing it and there is no reason why it would pose any sort of disadvantage to the consumer.
Dose it really make you sleep better at night if the GPU you bought was not a cut down version of something else ?
The point is that people should be able to know what they're buying. That's why things like panel lotteries are bad business.
(Unfortunately, the goal of marketing is the opposite. Marketing departments are about selling products based on irrationality as much as possible. The goal of a for-profit corporation, also, is not to enrich humanity. It's not to add value. It's to make certain people wealthier — nothing more. Wealth comes from selling a product for more than it's worth, so it's essential to confuse people enough to pay extra.)
It is not difficult for Nvidia to plainly add something to the name 1060 (e.g. 1060 XE) or to change the number (1059, 1061, etc.).
It's bad business to sell a bunch of different specs as a "1060". And, tacking on VRAM is a confusing method of differentiating, when the other specs change as well. Nvidia should stick with either a consistent letters suffix that indicates performance hierarchy (one that is consistent from generation to generation) or it should just change the numbers incrementally (1058, 1059, 1060, 1061, 1062, etc.). If the performance is worse in a revised model then the number should drop accordingly.
If Nvidia sells a card with indistinguishable performance difference that's a separate issue than selling products that are quite different under the same name, which certainly has happened. The latter is bad business. Consumers and their advocates (ideally, the tech press, for instance) have to stand up for themselves against the bias of corporate marketing. They don't work for us. We get the bare minimum as a rule.
Sell less for more is the ideal of any purely for-profit enterprise. So, it's up to us to demand more.
"Everybody's doing it" is a classic in the logical fallacies list, too.
