Anyway, ignoring all that, IMO gaming is still more affordable than it's ever been - you can get a used Xbox One S for about $100 on eBay, or for PC gaming, you can get a used RX 470 or GTX 1060 for a bit less than that, which are fine GPUs for 1080p gaming performance. Also, even relatively modern AAA games can now be played at low-medium settings at 720 or 1080p30 without a dedicated GPU on a late-model Ryzen APU.
[0] https://www.theregister.com/Print/2007/11/12/review_nvidia_g...
[1] https://www.hl.co.uk/tools/calculators/inflation-calculator
If you look at gaming builds from the last few years it's always a 1080/2080. These cards are essentially the equivalent of the 8800GT back then, ie. the one with high performance that you got if you didn't literally have money to burn. But how people can afford this stuff unless they have no other hobbies I don't know. Maybe the answer is they can't afford it? I'm not a single penny in debt.
By every relative and absolute metric, you are getting way more for your money than you did a decade ago, even vs other technology products (eg CPUs have made significantly less performance gains over the same period [0]) or experience (you can play the latest titles at much better fidelity and frame rates than the 8800 GT could for games of that era).
Have high end card prices gone up? Sure, due to both to increased demand volatility (multiple waves of crypto booms and busts) as well several generations where Nvidia has simply not had viable competition in the highest performance categories, but even with that in mind, performance/$ has still kept climbing in just about every single category. Note: new generation low-mid range cards still haven't come out yet. Expect another bump in price/performance Q1/Q2 next year (GA106 & GA107 for Nvidia, Navi 22 and 23 for AMD, also potentially Intel's Xe DG2).
[0] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Core2-Extreme-Q68...
Since you added this after I started writing, I think your idea of what hardware most gamers have is just plain wrong. One only has to look at the Steam Hardware Survey results to see just how few people buy the top-end cards: https://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-amd-radeon-discrete-gpu-...
You can corroborate this w/ JPR's market reports which consistently show that mainstream and midrange cards (<$250) account for almost 80% of AIB sales: https://www.jonpeddie.com/press-releases/the-add-in-board-ma...
This also doesn't account, as you've seen from the used market, that most gamers on a budget upgrading can simply sell their previous card and effectively only pay a fraction of the price every time they are upgrading.
I see that I was mistaken, or perhaps misled, about what kind of card is actually required to be able to have a decent gaming experience today.
You've convinced me that the mid to upper-mid tier is not really that much different to how it was back then. I also should consider that while I was earning a pittance back then compared to what I earn now, I lived with my parents and didn't own a car or anything else really apart from my PC.
Now that consoles are basically gaming PCs, good gaming performance for AAA titles is increasingly anchored by each console generation, so there's a bit of a shift every 4-5 years - one happening now. There's also an insanely large backlog of games and a huge amount of F2P and competitive games that aim to be playable on iGPUs, which have also advanced considerably over the past few years.
Very likely prices pushed back up after Nvidia grabbed any market share they lost to ATI that caused them to give us a good deal.
They've got no ML drivers and capped FP32/64 performance.