That's no longer the case with Ryzen 9000 series though, is it? They put the 3D V-cache underneath the compute die, so that heat could be dissipated more efficiently, thereby unlocking the same clock speeds as the non-X3D models. So if the MSRP is observed, you can just pay $50 more than the 9950X and rest assured that you get the best-ever gaming performance in all situations without sacrificing on other workloads. And if some of your other workloads benefit from the additional cache too, all the better.
It still draws power, and as with all mainstream "high-performance" CPUs the power budget is a limiting factor which will lead to effectively lower clock speeds under various loads, unless you overclock of course.
This pricing is reasonable considering inflation and input costs going up over the past five years.
I think the CPU prices are quite reasonable, especially considering the actual inflation we've experienced over the past 5 years, these could easily have costed up to $1000 now.
My issue is with the crappy motherboard selection. It wasn't that long ago you could get a pretty well featured motherboard for $150, and you wouldn't be likely to run into unexpected limitations a few years later.
Nowadays, most "decent" motherboards are very expensive, and most of the ones using the top chipsets aren't even close to feature the full chipset!
So you better read all the fine print, like which M.2 slots share bandwidth with the graphics slot and other similar limitations, and hope that you can live within those constraints until the system has served you well. On top of that, since you can't run 2DPC memory at full speed, you have to take that into consideration too (not just the boards' fault). It's very frustrating getting to a point where perfectly good parts needs to be replaced because of a limitation with no upgrade path.
