It's pointless blaming people with chunky wallets for buying high end GPUs, Nvidia and AMD were unable to secure sufficient manufacturing capacity from Samsung and TSMC foundries, in addition to global materials shortages.
Whatever AMD/Nvidia may say, a graphics card shortage is actually quite a desirable thing from their point of view, as long as demand from consumers remains high. I'd imagine there's a sweet spot profitability wise, so producing a certain percentage more would probably benefit both companies to some extent, especially AMD, who I assume aspire to gain a larger share of the graphics card market.
Both companies can be blamed for choosing not to produce (a lot) more reference models, they aren't and have never been, on the side of consumers. Some may defend this, but they ultimately set the prices for reference models, if they need to increase their profit margins. Reference model prices were supposed to be a benchmark for third party manufacturers to aim for, but when AIBs are charging double the reference model price in some cases, I'd say it's not working.
Neither company has allowed pre-orders for reference models, in my view, this is the minimum they could have done, as a gesture of good will toward customers. I'm told this is something Nvidia did for the RTX 2000 series and below, so I think Nvidia realised they didn't 'need' to do this anymore and became even greedier.
