I agree that you need to optimize for the reasonably forseeable future. You are buying games for the next 5 years, not the last 5 years - although I do weight things towards the frontend, it is better to optimize for the next 3 years and 2 more of relevance than to try to aim for 5 years of relevance or 2 years of worse/3 years of relevance. Generally tail-end relevance is of low value, by the time 5 years are up things have still shifted enough it's time to upgrade anyway, unless you just don't care by that point.

I think 8GB is going to continue to be a long-lived target especially at 1080p resolutions (with whatever gains can be squeezed from upscaling etc too - although generally DLSS needs to inference against the full-quality textures etc). Series S has 8GB (of fast-partition ram, the rest is GTX 970 style slow-partition) and even Series X only has 10GB.

People also aren't giving enough credit to mesh shaders etc, the GTX 1650 is actually still in the game with 4GB in Alan Wake 2[0], it does make a difference. The "but a 2060 super isn't relevant anymore!" argument relies on the assumption that you're deciding not to turn on upscaling etc. 1650 can run AW2 on lowest-settings 1080p with 4gb with FSR2 and it looks fine, and it'd be even better with RTX/DLSS. 2060 with DLSS can do a console-like experience on AW2 zero problem.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFf8NsOi-HU&t=356s

Consoles have always been a mixed bag. Yeah, they get a lot of specific tweaking and they also have special hardware which helps somewhat. But overall you're working from a (later in the gen) fairly low baseline. 6700 non-XT performance is ok but nothing stellar, and optimization doesn't save that. But honestly what they are good at is removing "paralysis of choice", having too many choices really hurts people and the emotional feeling of having to turn the setting onto lowest hurts people, even if that's what the console does itself! It's at least pre-tweaked lowest settings etc (although often worse tech etc - FSR3 is blown away by DLSS 3.5 image quality let alone 4.0 and future iterations which aren't far away). You don't have to think about it, you just say "framerate or quality" and you probably know which you want.

That is the problem that people will struggle with. 8GB will still work. It just also will be a Series S level experience, modulo things like mesh shading that occasionally differentiate the consoles (PS5 lacks it iirc, as well as DP4a). And that can still often look fine. Will you get more from spending more? Yes. But it also doesn't take that much - series X is the 6700, series S is like APU territory. A 3080 blows away the series X, etc. But you will have to stomach through moving that slider from "native" to "performance" and the texture quality from "ultra" to "medium". Etc. People have lost touch of the world of yesterday when "can you run crysis" was an actual question and not a meme, slamming every setting to ultra is not a given when you buy an entry-level card, and people also can't handle the fact that $200-300 is now entry-level. Midrange is $500-700, high-end is $800 to "how much have you got".

And that's not NVIDIA, that's really just wafer costs. If you want to compare die sizes and MSRPs against 10+ years ago (look up GTX 670/GK104 lol), you have to bear in mind that a given die size might cost 5x what it did back then. And it increases ~30% every node-family since 28nm, more or less. It's gonna go up over time, if you aren't moving up in price you're moving down in product-design-bracket and are going to have to deal with more design compromises to hit those lower price-points in the face of rising costs. It sucks, but nobody has any better ideas - to paraphrase what someone once told me, "the industrial and creative poles of several societies and continents are laser-focused on pushing this backwards, and yet the problems only become more difficult after each success". There is no easy answer, lots of smart people are working at this.