system
A chat on subreddit /r/pcmasterrace
human
Maybe they are young and don’t remember the before times. I know people are saying since 2020, but really there’s been scarcity in cards off and on since 2017 when crypto was really blowing up. With Pascal and Polaris cards, they finally got to a good enough power to performance ratio to be a good deal to mine and they were hard to find since then.

So seeing cards in stock at stores does throw some people off, especially close to MSRP.
gpt
You used to be able to get new, fairly decent GPUs for $200-$300.  Not the absolute top of the line but enough to run new games well for a few years.  

edit. However, after 2 or 3 years you would have to start turning down your graphics settings so that your GPU could handle it.