Yeah, to be fair, I think that perception that everyone is gaming on (or even needs) very high-end GPUs has of course been purposefully cultivated by GPU vendor

Yeah, to be fair, I think that perception that everyone is gaming on (or even needs) very high-end GPUs has of course been purposefully cultivated by GPU vendors (while most sales are from mainstream cards, most profits are from enthusiast and high-end cards). Gamers in particular also seem to get overly hyped for the halo products, and treat whichever brand has better performance there very aspirationally. Nvidia's marketing has also been especially effective at jacking up prices on the highest-end the past couple years. Now that consoles are basically gaming PCs, good gaming performance for AAA titles is increasingly anchored by each console generation, so there's a bit of a shift every 4-5 years - one happening now. There's also an insanely large backlog of games and a huge amount of F2P and competitive games that aim to be playable on iGPUs, which have also advanced considerably over the past few years.