There was a time when the 80 series card was the flagship and the 90 was Titan for professional applications. You are falling for Nvidia's marketing strategy to increase profits.
Noctua sells air coolers for over $100. For that money you could buy a nice 3x120 aio from other companies. With noctua you are paying a premium for the silence. If you buy a cheap 4090 it is going to sound like a blender, this 4080 is going to be absolutely silent because it has such a large cooler and large fans. If you would rather have the extra performance for that money instead of silence then Noctua is not for you. I think people are approaching this the wrong way, they are looking at the huge cooler as overclocking headroom and that they can maximize the performance of the 4080 with this overbuilt cooler, and then they come to the conclusion that it is a bad deal because you can just buy a cheap 4090 and get so much better performance, but this is the absolute wrong way to think about this card. The extra large cooler means you can lower your fan speed and be so much quieter for the same performance, it's noise reduction headroom not overclocking/performance headroom. No other card can do this, you need to have a large overbuilt cooler.
Noctua is probably going to release a 4090 later (remember last gen they launched a 3070 and later went up 1 tier with a 3080) and the price of that is going to be possibly as high as $2000. I think that Nvidia has fooled everyone with the 4090, they used to be called Titan cards and were marketed toward professional applications not gaming and no one cared about them or how loud they were because those things were in remote servers. Now in what is honestly genius rebranding everyone cares about the Titan and wants to buy one for gaming and their personal workstation and I bet most people buying it now really don't need that much performance or vram.
