Find me a system that can play 4k (whether full pixel count or upscaled) for 650 and let me know, I'm genuinely parts shopping for my brother's PC project right now and I'm at a legit loss here, he plays AAA stuff.
The reason ports are "bad" are mainly down to new console gen pushing min specs up, it's not a coincidence that most of the games that are seen as problematic ports (TLOU/Jedi Survivor/Hogwarts) are all "next-gen only" games, everything is VRAM hungry nowadays it seems.
Also for some reason AMD and Nvidia are both really shitting the bed lately in terms of pricing and product QA.
Any other time and I would agree with all your suggestions, but at this moment in time I have to disagree.
PC parts have gotten far more expensive in terms of frame/$ lately, this isn't the GTX1000 series days where a 1080 or 1070 would last for a long-ass time.