I bought a 3080 for 1200 euro's back in the crypto boom, if i could buy a 3090 founders edition i would have bought it instantly, not for the 10% performance increase but for its gigantic v-ram increase and the same price anyway. the 700 buck 3080's where basically not found anywhere in stock ever, and the 10gb on a 3080 was always going to become a issue.
The 4080 16gb was a bit better this gen around v-ram wise, but the price they asked for the card, made it simple not attractive towards higher end buyers, and people with lesser budgets where fine settling for 4070's if they didn't already had 3080's/3090's.
With the 5080 rumored to be 16gb and games demanding more and more v-ram but also performance specially with path tracing and framegen being a thing now, and who knows what else dlss 4 brings to the table, for many the 5080 simple isn't a option to consider just because of the lack of v-ram, and from what we see the 5080 is probably not going to be much more faster then a 4090. With 5080 having half the stats of a 5090, we will see a big run on the 5090 because its simple the only upgrade, or its waiting until the 6000 series to drop which could take another 2 years.
The thing is Nvidia knows what gamers want, and they exploit them to the maximum they can. Nvidia never gave a shit about gamers. The only difference is AMD is putting absolute zero effort in competing. I have no idea who the fuck wants to buy a GPU that doesn't have a AI upscaler at the bare minimum, hell even sony had to design there own AI upscaler because AMD just isn't doing it.