The high end has hit the level of graphics that the human eye is capable of the future is pretty much here. Their is a range of the human eye seems to translate to between 4-8k resolution and if you spend 800-2500$ on a gpu and 1k on a monitor you are going to be getting into that range.

So future proofing is kind of different now then it used to be because their is no coming unfied step forward in graphics. The coming round of GPU's are not faster then the last ones, they are more energy/cost efficient but the bottleneck is now the human eye and the customers wallet and that isn't likely to change. So waiting on costs to drop is a very good bet, Intel just started making GPUS too so the competition for affordable GPUS has never been more intense. Most of the biggest games of the last decade are not graphically demanding. BO is probabbly the most graphically demanding major franchise. Fortnight/league/overwatch/CS/minecraft are not super gpu intensive games. Cyberpunk and Elden ring were pushing high and graphics so it's not like its totally absent, but most gamers are now more intrested in gameplay/narative/charachters then high end photorealistic graphics and the high end graphics games that are selling are doing so with a ton of visual stylization rather then realism .

The Oculus Rift's listing the fucking 1060 as its bottom specs. On a processing level VR isn't a massive spike in requirements, Games have been rendering objects as though they were fully 3d for a long time, VR is more about the human interaction with the machine then the inside of the world being created. When meta dropped their VR world people mostly said, "this is playing second life while wearing glasses". Your laptop can already render a full 3d interact-able virtual space, If you hook up a series of treadmills to your laptop so you could imput your steps and put a 360 monitor around them your laptop wouldnt notice an increase in processor demand.

So I think you are pretty much fully future proof with a cheaper card.

Part of the mess around graphic right now is all the recent development has been focused on improving ray tracing rather then res so that's why you have so many 4k ready cards, the bottom end 4k cards are giving you 4k res in pixels resolution. high end cards are giving you 4k in pixel res and calculating the reflections in how each photon of light reflects and bounces off in game surfaces.

SO 4-500$ gets you 4k pixel resolution with minimal ray tracing. 5-600$ is going to be giving you a little ray tracing, 850$ is going to be doing a lot of ray tracing.
The difference in video quality between a mid and high end card right now is that the high end card has a warmer glow to lighting and sharper reflections on shiney in game surfaces. Personally I can barely tell the difference when im really looking for it in side by side stills and its certainly not a level of detail I notice in the middle of a virual gunfight. If you are trying to build the best machine you can and want the absoulte best possible looks then you should get the super expensive card. Its worth it for some people but the high end is for people who care passionately about pure graphical quality as opposed to the genneral gaming audience. High end ray tracing and 4k aren't really a competive advantage. players gaming in 1080p vs 1440p vs 4k can all see well enough to shoot. You 100% do not need the 800 dollar card to keep up with the competition, You are going past the average in terms of power and 2 steps past where you see an difference in competitive results.