Agree.
There's little reason to build a pure gaming machine anymore given both AMD and NVIDIA have pushed incremental improvement into 1k+ MSRP bracket (without factoring market price selling for double). Pre 2016, a $300-400 GPU would pretty much get you the top end offerings in terms of price/performance metric of the BEST offerings at the time. Hell.. even the GTX1080 a year later was selling for $399 on sale since it was worse than 1070 for mining purposes due to GDDR5X being generally worse.
When AMD couldn't compete, they were selling rather expensive compute hardware for only $500-600 USD on sale... lol.. It's just kind of insane to me..... Hell, Even with inflation, there's a clear "adjustment" of what the hardware is today.
I've already checked out in terms of AAA gaming on PC. Granted, I'm getting older and don't really have the same interest... I think the Xbox series X is just the better price performance aspect right now if you're an AAA gamer and want visuals without technical issues. I've seen 3090s and 6900XTs struggle to run popular titles.
E-sports gaming? Well that's different, though most are CPU bound... A GPU that's good enough is going to be the problem moving forward. Hopefully future APU's solve that.. Might have wait until DDR6 as DDR5 is more of a leap frog product from my point of view.