I've noticed the ridiculous motherboard pricing lately. I don't think I've ever spent more than around £200 on a motherboard and the last boards I purchased that were anywhere near that were an Asus X99-A and an Asus X470 ITX board. Typically I've always spent between £100 and £150 on mid-range boards that have done everything I need like my £150 Asus P8Z68-V Pro board for my i7 2600K system back in the day.
Even with inflation as it is, £150 in 2011 is equivalent to around £203 today. However, a similar equivalent today would be an Asus Z690 or Z790 board and to be fair, a Z690 board can be had on OcUK (albeit out of stock currently) for £210 so that does put it kind of even. The cheapest Asus Z790 board is £240 so it's not massively ahead. However the current crop of ITX boards are disgustingly priced - the X670 version of the Asus ITX board I paid £185 for back in 2018 is £460. Other than the newer chipset there isn't a huge amount of difference yet it's more than double the price, even after factoring inflation into account.
I think what's happening now is that we're seeing ridiculous tiers of boards with pointless features that most people just don't need. Intel boards are available at sensible prices, but it's just we have stupid £500+ boards available too. Arguably even the cheapest AM5 board on OCUK is £265 (albeit out of stock) so you could make a case that at that end of the scale, the price hike isn't so bad. I certainly won't be buying into these stupid tiered boards though. In no realm does a £915 motherboard like the Asus X670-E Extreme make any sense at all in my mind.
So I suppose the point I'm making is that sensibly priced boards are out there (unless you want to go ITX) and with taking inflation into account it's not priced all that much higher than it used to be years ago, it's just that we've got more pointless expensive options available that makes it seem worse. I'd argue that RAM being relatively well priced at present, along with SSD pricing being extremely good, that prices all in all aren't too bad as long as you're not trying to go top end. Mid-range builds are affordable, until you factor in GPU pricing but that's definitely a whole **** show on its own. My days of buying high-end hardware are well and truly over, so I'll be sitting with my Ryzen 5700X/48GB RAM/GeForce 3070 build for quite some time to come.