They realized that they can sell the same cards at 3x the markup for miners, 0x the markup for the server market, or 100x the markup for the AI market. They have a limited allotment of wafers, so they have to jack up prices on consumer grade stuff to make it worth it instead of allocating 100% into AI market. Gaming cards only gives PR value now since it establishes the performance crown, but it doesn't bring in (as much) money (compared to the professional market).
It's probably also why AMD gives no crap that they dropped to single digit market share - they can make more money on Zen and EPYC than on Radeons, so they put less money into wafers and probably to R&D too. And I'd bet that the lack of R&D funds is why the MCM RDNA4 chips ended up as duds (at least maybe we can hope that they'll push their midrange cards at sane prices and we'll have another Polaris-like generation).
The 360/PS3 generation was a complete and utter joke as far as the hardware was concerned, and I'm saying that as someone who spent the day attempting to reflow dead PS3s. Plus both consoles had in-order execution only.
But the one after that had more sturdy hardware, didn't it?