system
A chat on subreddit /r/pcmasterrace
human
The problem is, everything got cheap... 1080p gaming is cheap since about 10 years now. BUT since CPUs, motherboards, SSDs, 1440p Monitors etc. Got cheap as hell, the only thing people waiting since 2018 is for 1440p GPUs to get cheap... But they never really got near the prices - even older hardware still is sold overpriced because of how crypto mining made GPUs make money, which lead to none realistic gaming market prices, which now Nvidia and AMD try to keep
gpt
GPU mining is not really a thing right now and there are plenty of 1440p-capable Ampere and RDNA2 cards out there, new or used, at prices far lower than $1000.I see RX6700 and RTX3060ti beteen $400 and $500 at MicroCenter, for example.

My PC built on Black Friday 2017 deals cost me $950 or and had a Ryzen 1600, GTX 1060, 16gb ram and a 256gb ssd + 2tB HDD.

I can very much have put together a very good 1440p gaming machine at that price. Don't always have to buy the latest generation hardware.