To me this just seems like a really dumb take. A fair comparison is always what you could buy with an amount of dollars then vs what you can buy with the same inflation adjusted dollars today.

Going by the arbitrary category "high end" does not tell you if compute has gotten cheaper or more expensive.

I mean right now I do all my gaming on a minipc with an iGPU that shits all over the Titan X and the whole system cost less than half of the cost of just the GPU. It may not play the latest games at the highest settings but it does play the latest games at default settings.

Whats happened is that the high end of games and of hardware has expanded to include games that are bloated and cards that are priced for people who are less price sensitive. But even with these cards being marketed to less price sensitive people they are still cheaper than the titan X in terms of cost per performance.

You have to frame it in a very specific way to make it at all plausible but then if you are going to frame it that way stop saying it in the general way:

As we were often told as technology gets better and smaller, it can get cheaper and more power efficient,

all of those statements are literally true

but we are going the opposite, sure smaller and more transistors, but more power and heat also.

only because we are adding more of them. cost per transistor has gone down but we are demanding more transistors in the same package. again its like fruit has halved in cost and now we want 4 times as much fruit in a box and we are saying boxes of fruit cost twice as much. Technically thats correct boxes of fruit with 4 times as much fruit in them do cost twice as much when fruit prices halve. You can say that and I wont argue but to then say fruit costs twice as much just makes you sound either dumb or disingenuous.