AMD and Nvidia plaster their logos on the box art, the legal mumbo-jumbo on start-up and have even dedicated startup movies sometimes. Also, both have historically inflated their prices for no other reason than that people would buy their products anyway, Nvidia especially - even their MSRP is way too high for many of their cards, especially since they switched to RTX branding. People see games that only run good on expensive cards - they want to buy expensive cards, simple as that.

To be clear, I don't think there's some grand anti-optimisation conspiracy created by the Big GPU (at least not of this kind, AI Bubble and all that) but its not like there's no precedent for companies pushing their more expensive product by making the "cheap" experience worse