Complaining only signals that you are not the market they’re targeting. This is for Hollywood media makers, high end studios, etc. This was never to be a mass market item.
That said a lot of the industry is moving to the cloud anyway and doesn't require workstations. Some shops are entirely on Linux. Audio post/recording and editing are the last bastions of mac pro dominance, imo.
Audio post/recording shops use Protools HDX systems [1] which are rackmount units holding a handful of DSPs connected to the PC with proprietary PCIe cards. The industry is moving towards ASPs as a whole, through products like Waves Soundgrid [2] and Universal Audio's UAD [3]. Of these, PT HDX has an API for developing 3rd party code to run on their hardware (it's proprietary however) and the SOUL [4] project is aimed at these kinds of solutions.
Dedicated audio processing units are about where GPUs were 25-30 years ago. Almost all proprietary, no shader languages, but CPU time is coming at a premium so we'll have to figure something out.
[1] https://www.avid.com/products/pro-tools-hdx [2] https://www.waves.com/soundgrid-systems [3] https://www.uaudio.com/uad-accelerators.html [4] https://github.com/soul-lang/SOUL
Now that's not to say that having a fast machine isn't important, it certainly is since a large chunk of DSP is not running on dedicated hardware (and that hardware is freaking pricy). But in most situations your audio processing is dominated by single threaded performance, which is why some people are irritated by the iMac Pro advertised as a pro workstation when it will thermal throttle on you under moderate load, and this new Mac Pro that hopefully has better cooling and a better processor will be a huge relief for users and developers who want more CPU cycles for our code.
With respect to cloud, some applications just simply can't use workstations. VFX stuff is mostly on distributed Linux systems these days because you can't put the power you need into a single box, or at least it's more effective to have people edit over 10Gbit connections through a terminal.
The rest of the cloud stuff is more about workflow than power, at least in the stuff I've seen most cloud applications are about synchronizing projects in the highly parallelized production pipelines used in Hollywood studios. NAB is littered with cloud workflow solutions every year.
Perhaps that's what Apple sees in the Mac Pro as well.
Point is that "professional" is a lot broader than just a few big enterprises.
Paying $6k for what’s roughly $2k’s worth of regular consumer hardware is also money.
I understand paying a premium for the R&D that would have gone into the case and cooling design, but to then go and put such dated hardware in it and still start at $6000.