NVIDIA was a GPU manufacturer that bought a license for the ARM architecture and developed their own CPU/GPU SOC that they demoed in the "NVIDIA Shield" player that later made a design win in the Nintendo Switch. NVIDIA tried to buy ARM but got blocked by regulators.
I have two guesses about what is going on.
One is that the benefits of smaller transistor sizes are getting reduced in generation after generation. From the 1980s to 2005 the clock rate would go up so you not only had more complex chips, but they got faster explosively. Post 2005 clock rates have been stagnant but they would give you more cores, better SIMD facilities and better instruction per clock.
Still the price per transistor would fall but we are on the cusp of the price not dropping when the die shrinks. The move to chiplets, advanced packaging, and all that doesn't really help because you are still assembling packages out of expensive chips and spending more money on additional manufacturing steps. (Even if it does mean you can build SKUs that wouldn't otherwise be practical by putting together parts from a library.)
(The worst thing on the horizon may be that the lifetime of transistors is going to get shorter in which case a 50-series will not only have an eye watering price but it will burn up in two years.)
All of that is pointing to GPU economics getting worse whether or not the vendors are profiteering.
You might say they'd have a reason not to profiteer to not hurt their business in the long term but I'm not sure what business they will have in the long term. PC and console gaming have been shrinking relative to mobile gaming in recent years
https://kevurugames.com/blog/mobile-gaming-vs-pc-gaming-over...
Mobile gaming is nearly half of the business now and growing, the whole industry is being remade in the shape of phones and maybe they figure the gaming PC you build now (if you build a gaming PC) will be the last one you ever build and they'd better take you for all you're worth.
(The cloud changes the economics too because potentially a $2000 GPU in the cloud can be utilized close to 100% by different users whereas the GPU in your PC will usually be used just when you're playing. By that standard NVIDIA and AMD can't afford to sell you a GPU when a cloud compute vendor could afford to pay more for it.)
I got really depressed about the state of the game industry when I went shopping for games that expired on my XBOX ONE and found that, unlike lists for Nintendo platforms, "top 25" and such lists for the XBOX ONE are full of titles I made up my mind about years ago like "Call of Duty", "Assassin's Creed" and "Madden NFL". Shockingly, Skyrim was on the list despite it being a bargain bin game when I had an Xbox 360. Unlike Japanese and Chinese game studios, Western companies are not introducing major new games, just making more "Assassin's Creed" games, the one new game I can think of is "Control" and that comes from Finland.