from my experience, it's nearly always the gamers complaining, usually blaming crypto for them not being able to afford a GPU
Besides, we need to blame amateur AI enthusiasts for the high GPU prices now.
RDNA2 was a relatively poor miner (worse than RDNA1) precisely because RDNA2 already did the same thing as Ada, replaced real bandwidth with cache. And generally that's fine and it performs well, because games are a pretty normal workload. But mining is deliberately completely random and uncacheable (otherwise you could cache the parts of the DAG that you need) and benefits more from the raw bandwidth, because the cache does ~nothing.
Miners have always been fucking great at astroturfing, like in 2021-2022 they had a ton of people convinced that it was just some giant production shortage and NVIDIA just wasn't making any cards etc. Or the arguments about how the mining LHR limiter was "bad for gamers" because you wouldn't be able to mine as profitably in your spare time (of course ignoring that paying double MSRP in the first place kinda offsets that and in fact necessitates mining to even make the purchase make sense). Miners are fundamentally just nerds who post on tech forums and gaming forums and know what arguments are convincing and catch traction etc.
Can I see those guys making a particular stink about the last source of super-wide memory bus cards drying up? Yes. They already bought up all the 5700XTs etc, Ampere was the last hurrah of the Big Memory Bus, and actually it would make sense if a ton of the outright agitators had some history in mining subs/etc.
It shouldn't really matter to gamers where the bandwidth comes from. Yes, cache hit rates decline at higher resolutions, but in reasonable configurations (eg not 4060 at 4K) the cache systems on RDNA2 and Ada are basically seamless/transparent to gamers. Games are cacheable workloads. It's fine. Things like the yuzu dev running 16K downscaled to 4K and complaining he had some performance loss on a 4060 is the extreme exception. They're not transparent to miners though.
In accordance with hanlon's law, however, I will admit that gamers are some extremely dumb motherfuckers (ahem, "often lack understanding of relevant technical details and frequently tend to bandwagon even when it doesn't make sense" etc) and it could just be people getting riled up about stuff they don't fully understand from semi-trusted tech-media figures telling them to be upset. We went through this same "it shouldn't matter how the bandwidth gets there" thing with texture delta compression, there were people insisting for ages that it was bad and hurt image quality despite it being lossless, and that AMD's image quality was better despite them implementing the same lossless delta compression approaches in GCN3 (Tonga/Fiji). It's more bits delivered per bit, without even a real power usage hit (unlike GDDR6X which was an incredibly mixed bag). Or with Fiji's HBM and Vega's HBM2/HBCC supposedly being some magic thing that let you swap across a 16 GB/s pcie bus without any sort of framebuffer size limitation etc... the gaming community is real bad at critical understanding and thinking about some of this deeper tech stuff.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/8526/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-r...
https://www.anandtech.com/show/8460/amd-radeon-r9-285-review...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ8YlXh-jbI&t=280s
(Reviewers, on the other hand, there's really no excuse, and a lot of them are playing silly buggers largely at the expense of their viewers. People getting surprised by Alan Wake 2 that DX12U/DX12.2 is a thing that matters and is being adopted, people getting surprised that upscalers are a thing that matters and will matter more as UE5/6 and other intensive games come to rely on them, people getting surprised that mesh shaders reduce VRAM utilization, etc. They have basically done nothing to inform their viewers about any of the broader developments in the field other than whining about VRAM. It really does feel like a lot of the last 5 years has been a bunch of the reviewers being activists about the graphics field not going the way they want it to: they don't want upscaling, they want a return to moore's law and real raster gains etc, even though that's not possible and they understand perfectly well why. The trajectory of, eg, Steve Gamersnexus has really been something else, contrast his take on DX12 with his take on the RTX launch and DX12U/DX12.2. And pretty much everyone, too, continues to drag their feet on admitting DLSS is real framerate improvement etc that actually matters to card performance and efficiency etc. Reviewers discussed visual quality/pipeline quirks as part of GPU reviews for ages and it is increasingly going to be necessary again as more of this stuff is shunted into brand-specific platform libraries like DLSS, Metal, XeSS, and FSR. Doesn't matter if they don't wanna, it's necessary. It's very aggravating, for someone who wants to see the tech discussed and move forward.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qiQH29KAXg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqLea0QUW1k&t=176s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqLea0QUW1k&t=268 (just buy it!)
Apples to apples, the 4060 is under $300 street price vs the 3060 Ti usually riding at $450 absolute minimum, almost as fast , far more efficient, supports newer DLSS features and AV1 encoding, etc. Samsung 8 was an incredibly cheap node and TSMC 4nm is incredibly expensive, so Ada was starting from a disadvantage in terms of perf/$ step, and also 3060 Ti was the absolute king of the "mainstream" value lineup (again, to such an extent that it essentially never sold at MSRP).
How do you cut 1/3 of the product cost in that situation, while only losing 8.7% performance? Some heavy-duty cost-downs. Obviously NVIDIA wasn't going to continue shipping 400-450mm2 of silicon in the x60 tier once they moved back to a modern node (and people have forgotten the die sizes involved with leading node products like 10-series or 600 series, they are quite small). And since PHYs don't really shrink, and since TSMC 7nm and 5nm have really good SRAM density, the obvious strategy is to replace raw memory bandwidth with cache. Which is the same thing AMD did with Infinity Cache in the previous generation. PCIe bus has the same problem, which is why AMD was first to the party with "mainstream" cards like 5500XT and 6600XT with cut-down x8 pcie bus as well.
These compromises are going to become increasingly heavy at the bottom of the stack. Remember, it's not like $150 products don't exist anymore, but they're going to look less like a Radeon 7850 and more like a RX 6500 XT. First they start having "entry-level" characteristics like 4060/7600 currently are, then they become HTPC tier stuff like 6500XT. They cease being products that will interest enthusiasts. Smaller memory buses, VRAM won't keep page with the needs of gaming, poor perf/$ for gaming, or the double-VRAM variants (like 4060 Ti!) will have good VRAM but atrocious value. There rarely is a moment where things actually roll backwards, but prices won't continue to approach $0 infinitely either, it follows a pattern of stagnating performance/VRAM in the face of increasing gaming requirements, and increasing amounts of compromises to get the cost down further.
With how slow modern node progression has gotten, and how many compromises are involved with newer designs, the older nodes remain very very favorable especially for lower-end designs. A bigger design on an older node means you don't have to compromise the memory bus and PCIe bus, and there are definitely customers for whom a 3060 Ti is a better product. AMD leaving the 7600 (another 128b product!) behind on an older-node is (once again) a very forward-thinking cost-reduction attempt, just like their work on reducing memory buses and pcie buses, and frankly it's surprising that NVIDIA isn't continuing to churn out 3060 Ti for the lan cafe type markets etc. 1080 Ti performance in an 8GB card is very adequate at the right price, and inventory stockpiles aside the 3060 Ti is much more attractive than the regular 3060 let alone the weird cutdowns.
If you don't want to make the compromises, you have to follow your product-design-bracket upwards in price. The price for a current-gen mainstream card in terms of the design expectations of mainstream gaming customers is $500-600 now.
And that's the part I think everyone just struggles with. $250-300 is entry-level cards now. The 4060 is perfectly fine in the context of an entry-level design that makes compromises to hit entry-level price points. $500-750 is mainstream where you are getting no-compromises on featureset/VRAM and balanced performance with good overall value. $1200-2000 is the enthusiast range where you get to check all the boxes and have the top-tier card that does RT everything with 24GB of VRAM etc. If you don't follow the design brackets upwards over time, then you are stepping downwards in design tiers from enthusiast to mainstream to entry-level, and you gradually get a more and more compromised product. 7850 becomes 6500XT.
At the end of the day it's already a low-margin, wafer-intensive business with a lot of supply risk (holy shit imagine trying to balance inventory through mining). NVIDIA has enterprise/AI, and AMD has constant supply issues in mobile and wants to take ground in datacenter. There is no real necessity for them to do this as a charity when they could be making more money elsewhere with their supply constraints, and it's actively bad for them to set up these crazy high-value products like 3060 Ti where it ruins the sales of the next 2 gens and breeds bad blood with customers. Arguably it's even bad to be doing the firesales to clear old inventory (as AMD found out with some reviewers panning RDNA3 too). If node progression and gen progression is slowing down, you don't need to firesale it to get it gone, it's not going to be e-waste in another year like in the 2000s.
AMD and NVIDIA are gonna make the products they can afford to make, sustainably, and they're not gonna cut their throat anymore with crazy deals like 970 or 3060 Ti/3080. If some segments are eroding because they're no longer viable gaming products, or because they're being eaten by APUs (and I'm including consoles as GDDR-based APUs) then fine, they won't make those products in the future. The $200-300 segment as a gaming gpu segment is not going to be forever, I expect the 8500XT/5050 and 9500/6030 will be quite boring for gamers just like 6500XT/3050 is.