Sometimes you just have to accept the current pricing and buy what you need to buy (assuming you need to buy anything at all).

7 years ago it was the same price, but then again, the last 7 years have involved accelerated inflation. So, the same price is actually a lower price.

If you're looking for a card in the sane $300 area, the Intel ARC B580 (12GB) or the RX 9060XT (8GB) are a reasonable value. If you want 12GB+ from Nvidia or AMD the used market in previous generations is a good place to look: maybe something like a RTX 3060Ti (12GB) or RX6800XT (16GB).

I personally don't think the GPU market is incredibly miserable. Maybe I am just used to the pain or something? Nvidia has a bit of a tax where but something like the RX 9070XT is basically the 3rd fastest gaming GPU money can buy and it's around $700. (I'm not sure why the 5070ti costs $200 more even given Nvidia's software advantages. It performs almost identically it just doesn't make purchase sense)

When investors stop to ponder if they are ever going to see any return on their superhot AI investments, you'll have all the cheap hardware you could ever want.

You cannot be fully free if you're attached to physical goods.

It may sound like pseudo-Buddhist claptrap, but it's also true. Or, I suppose, Fight Club claptrap. It's still true.

The choice is "do you want to participate in society, its benefits and drawbacks". You can't have only one side of that.

Since we're 10 years on at this point, I feel pretty confident saying the plateau to my eyes landed somewhere between the PS4 in 2013 and Pascal (GeForce 10-series) in 2016.

I've kept playing games and upgrading my GPU every other generation, and they're still fully utilized, but I can't really see where the additional compute and money is going. My biggest visual upgrade during that time was actually going from LED to HDR OLED which is something that requires virtually no additional processing power.

I still think it pretty much was the last major generational upgrade in graphics. An early PS3 game looked night and day better than a late PS2 game. Meanwhile, an early PS4 game looked only marginally better than a late PS3 game, and most PS5 games don't look noticeably better than a PS4 game.

I don't mind that graphics have plateaued, because they aren't the important bit. If anything, I would rather that devs stop trying to chase graphics and make more games with shorter dev cycles.