That wasn't the main point though. The point was that a few generations ago, Nvidia was selling mid range silicon, 60 and 70 series cards, for around 300 to 400 USD price point. Now with the 4000 series, the 60 and 70 series silicone have the specs of the older 50 and 60 silicon, at much higher price points.

Nvidia is now selling us less silicone die for way more money, and their sales numbers reflect that.

From what I can tell, AAA devs typically target compatibility with consoles first, usually whatever is latest generation at the anticipated release date for their game. And these are equivalent to mid-range gaming rigs at best. Then they work on PC compatibility afterwards and poorly optimize performance of their assets against a common GPU compatibility layer that adjusts the features it enables (if they exist in this version of what's likely a shared underlying game engine) based on hardware compatibility.

If we're very lucky, the game will get tested against a wide range of hardware. Sane defaults for GPU feature flags based on detection of hardware capability and the results of that testing will result in a default user experience that doesn't need manual adjustment. If we're lucky.

So tl;dr, they're not targeting the top 1% of hardware. Typically they just screw things up and don't catch it. But higher end hardware will handle poor optimization better and provide a better experience. So it can feel like they're 'targeting' that hardware when really its a poorly optimized port.

That’s sort of the point of AAA games, though. There’s an entire universe of non-AAA games that will run just fine on extremely dated hardware.

AAA devs target the consoles level of performance, and its been like that for a while. A lot of "extreme" settings in games are usually just poorly optimized and sometimes even looks ugly or almost does nothing artistically or experience wise.