It was available at this MSRP 3 years ago, direct from Nvidia. It now goes for 3-4k USD, as you point out. MSRP stopped being a useful value for graphics card around that time. You realize the price hike, but still mentioned that 1.6k figure after.

No normal person is spending 3-4k on a GPU from 3 years ago. The availability is also of questionable provenance.

The MSRP is a good proxy for the 'level' of a card. It's not like the 4090 was a freak outlier. Cards of a comparable price offer comparable performance. So the 'level' for running a frontier level model at high performance is now at $1600 and continuing to trend sharply downwards.

Another nuance is that the computer hardware market is currently extremely inefficient in a way I don't understand. You can pick these cards up locally at places throughout Asia for around $2k new. That's retail single unit prices. No idea what's stopping somebody from closing the gap and making a ton of money - perhaps tariffs and data centers purchasing in a price insensitive fashion. Whatever the exact reason may be, what people pay for hardware is increasingly just radically different depending on where you buy it at.