I think the idea is that as technology improves, you can get better technology for the same price. That's what the system of capitalism promised to us.

That does tend to happen... an 8 core Zen 5 (9700X) costs about the same today as the 6 core Zen 5 (9600X) did two years ago. But even if AMD doesn't have any defective 9700X to disable cores and sell as 9600X, they still want to attract the value buyer and so they'll take some perfectly fine chips, disable two cores and sell them as 9600X for less than the 9700X. They lose some margin, but they make it up in volume as we were promised.