I've had an RX 480 for 5 years now, the longest I've ever held a videocard. Thankfully, I mostly play older games and the only "new" games I tend to play are multiplayer titles that I can either lower graphics or are already running too slow. My R5 3600 takes care of every emulation or other CPU need I might have. I've had some random GPU related hiccups here and there which have given me a mini heart-attack, I really don't want to have to replace this GPU at this time. I too worry that the ship has sailed and this is the new normal even if shortages are eventually tackled. If that's the case, I'm never buying a new GPU again, unless I find something very enticing secondhand. I'll make sure my next CPU has an IGP as well, just in case my card dies.
I've been browsing some old mags for some project and I think 2007-2009 was the golden era when it came to hardware. CPUs were getting ridiculously fast and cheap (E8400 was 150-160E !), RAM was pretty cheap, motherboards were... alright, but to be truthful some of the designs were stuck in prior year mentalities and were incapable of handling some big CPUs, HDDs were pretty cheap and SSDs were a luxury, wow-factor item even in 2009, totally unnecessary and of course, more importantly, GPUs were absolutely ridiculous value-for-money monsters. Late 2007 you had 3850 and 3870 from AMD and 8800GT from NVidia, none of which exceeded 250E for 512MB versions and especially the latter could serve one well for many years. Then, in the summer of 2008, you got 4850 and 4870, again not one of these was above 250E and the 4870 was alarmingly close to the GTX 280 which cost almost twice as much. And the prices were falling, come summer of 2009 you could get a custom-cooled Sapphire Toxic or Vapor-X 4850 for ~110-120E. The budget offerings were really great as well, 4670 was sub 100E and offered great value, by early-ish 2009 you could get the 4770 which was a very power-efficient GPU on the then new 40nm process trading blows with 4850 at roughly 100E.
By 2012-2013, the writing was already on the wall with new single chip CPUs launching at ~600$ and of course Nvidia's Titan at 1000$. Year by year it got worse, but I never expected it to get this bad. Then again, I never expected a full-scale pandemic for 2+ years, so there's that tiny detail. I just don't see how this could ever go back to the era I described, that'd be like Nvidia launching their new 3050 at 80-100$. Obviously there's a lot of talk about chip density, newer processes being way more expensive, Moore's Law dying out (although this observation has its detractors, Jim Keller comes to mind and has given some great talks on the subject)...
If it reaches a point where I can either get a Playstation 5 or a new GPU, I'm going Playstation 5, thing's have gone ridiculous.