You somehow managed to write a post where every single sentence is absolutely wrong. FPGAs clearly make sense for prototyping ASICs. That alone makes FPGAs make

You somehow managed to write a post where every single sentence is absolutely wrong. FPGAs clearly make sense for prototyping ASICs. That alone makes FPGAs make sense even if it is a tiny niche market. After all, the budget of ASIC companies is big. A few hundred FPGAs for developers are a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of an ASIC. Too expensive in volume only applies to Xilinx and Altera and with every node shrink, the amount of designs that fit on an FPGA grow while the non recurrent development costs grow for ASICs. Due to this, the maximum volume at which FPGAs remain cost competitive keeps growing with every generation. Smart NICs make extensive use of reconfiguration because things such as protocols are not set in stone. They can change all the time. It is also possible to build designs that make extensive use of partial reconfiguration. MPSoCs have been a thing for a long time. If you want to get into those Google Kria 260 and you will be pleasantly surprised. When I take a look at Effinix FPGAs those are designed specifically for vision applications and massive amounts of I/O. A CPU would struggle with multiple camera streams and consume too much power. Yeah ok but an 100k LUT FPGA Chip from Effinix costs what? 25€? You're going to need a really high volume to get an overall cost saving. 40000 FPGAs is only a million dollars. The masks of an 22nm ASIC cost 1.5 million dollars without the rest of the development costs. And finally your last sentence contradicts the first. Next time stick with a story.