You might have missed it with how long the inflated market lasted, but in the last few months with the ethereum PoS transition and the threat of recession keeping gamers at bay they literally haven't been able to sell the 30-series cards for quite a bit under MSRP in what was a very sudden reversal from being above MSRP. Maybe a new series stole the demand but part of the reason they're holding out on lower tier SKUs is the 30-series is not going away fast enough, so there's a good chance that we're back in the 10-series vs 20-series day where there's so much used stock of the old series and a perception that nvidia is gouging to the extent that it hamepers sales of the new ones.
30 series launch MSRPs looked very good until it became clear you couldn't get them for that price, partly because they were having to partially roll back the 20 series price increases, so it wouldn't be impossible to see a repeat.
For the 30 series it was the 3080 in particular which looked fantastic - it had 95% the performance of the 3090 for half the price ($750 vs $1500) and it was a large improvement on the previous generation.
This time around the 4090 is an excellent card, the 4080 16GB is a lot slower and the 4080 12GB a lot slower than the 16GB.
They've also jacked the prices: the 4080 should be $750 and the 4090 should be $1500. Arguably lower again given the coming recession and the market being flooded with the previous generation.
It will be interesting to see what AMD do as they could make life very difficult for nVidia.
30 series launch MSRPs looked very good until it became clear you couldn't get them for that price, partly because they were having to partially roll back the 20 series price increases, so it wouldn't be impossible to see a repeat.