If I never buy another GPU or console again, there’s more than enough quality gaming for several lifetimes available on older hardware and often very inexpensively.
I'm with you, but given that I have no control over any of them I wouldn't have minded that my luxury fun was still cheap. About a decade or so ago, I remember saying something like "We're in an odd period historically: if you except housing, healthcare, and education, everything else is _stunningly_ cheap by historical norms." I wasn't trying to discount the importance of those things, but it felt like there was at least some relief among the rising costs there. Now, it seems like "everything else" has caught up and it's simply that everything is expensive.
We all have a little bit of control over at least housing and transport. Local politics determine land use, and municipalities in the US have consistently voted for more car dependency (leading to more expensive transport) and limited housing construction (leading to more expensive housing).
Local politics aren't really paid attention to, which results in any amount of participation and influence having a relatively large impact compared to state or federal politics.
At this point there is hardly anything left and I think it leads to some pretty dark scenarios when we have a society where we have somehow decided: fuck it, almost everything gets worse for almost all of you every single year.
What makes you think demand won't drive those prices up as well? And this is more than just gaming, the Steam Deck prices are increased due to the increase cost of general components like RAM, which impacts machines used to do work as well.