Everybody can expect some level of inflation,but repeatedly between Nvidia,AMD and Intel they are trying Apple/Samsung tactics increasingly.
Within a year cards costing 40% or less of the price matched or exceeded the performance of said cards. 8800GTX was a huge chip too and the 8800GT was on a half node shrink a year later. GT200 was huge too,but soon had price cuts.The GTX580 and Geforce Titan were the same level in basic hardware positioning. The GTX780 you got was really a GTX570 replacement in hardware. It was only because of the R9 290X that Nvidia was forced to even release the GTX780TI and price cut the GTX780.
Both of these companies are essentially running a cartel now and IMHO fixing the prices to their advantage. It reminds me of the suspicious price increases we had with other parts like DDR2,etc which years later had the companies in trouble with regulators. Just like when we had the last mining craze from 2017 onwards we ended up with Turing. Zero to do with cost and more that consumers just enabled it.
The initial RTX3000 and RX6000 series were launched well into a pandemic and the RRP took into consideration the higher component costs. The fact that gamers stupidly paid through the nose for these cards(and miners didn't help too) only sent one message - they needed to charge more. So both charged more for the second time in less than 5 years.
Remember,people try to explain away why Intel was literally releasing the same quad cores for years,because of costs,technical issues,etc. People defended launch Zen3 pricing after criticising Intel for doing the same. Then AMD went and charged as much for both Zen4 and Zen5 CPUs.
In the end it's because they know gamers are easy to exploit.
The same reason why games are so expensive now and full of bugs. Gamers complain and still buy them. So,the companies realise they can make no effort and we have both enshittification and shrinkflation in progress.