The most difficult trend in GPUs is the lack of midrange and low range affordable GPUs. This hurts the most
The big pinch on low/mid range for me was during the shortage period but that's long gone.
Everything has just moved up the pricing ladder.
Taking that down to 2010 dollars that'd give you ~$200, exactly what you need for the low end sub-model of the shiny new GTX 460. The beefy pairing of that would be the 480 at $500, or 2.5x the price for roughly 1.6x performance. The 4060 vs the 4080 has a little more than twice that performance gap at around 2.4x performance difference or 1.5x more a performance gap but the price difference is also larger with $280 vs $1200, or than 4x the price or 1.6x the price gap. In all, the gaps themselves aren't significantly different but the price of the highest tier card is what has changed. Does that make the lower tier SKU inherently scrawny and poor value for the performance? I don't think it has any relation really, but if it did I'd say it would make more sense it was the opposite.
Looking at absolute numbers one sees, just as expected, the 4060 is right in the top 3 for performance per dollar https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_value.html. This makes is hard to argue the performance took a huge dip either. It's not much faster than the same card in the previous generation, but it's also not much more expensive. Over many generations it's significantly advanced in both regards. Really the only card that was significantly faster than it's direct predecessor this generation was the 4090 and its pricing gives even more credence to the idea it's the price of the top SKU cards rising not the performance per dollar of the low tier SKUs rising that leads to the increased laddering. The other big change is you don't see cards like the 1030 coming out at launch. It's not as much that the market has stopped being served as much as integrated GPUs have come up to that level of task and anybody getting a dedicated wants something more not something the same.
The GTX 460 is a big GPU. 332mm^2, 256 bit bus.
The RTX 4060 is less than half the size with half the bus width.
I know there are other factors, like silicon getting more expensive in general and L2 cache getting bigger, but still, the 4060 corresponds to a much "lower end" GPU in Nvidia's lineup of GPU dies.
The real metric for sizing silicon is transistors per dollar, not area used. Area is only used in how the fab will price a specific process and cannot be compared between process generations. I.e. it's as one factor in the overall price of among the current generation. If a billion comes out to 70 mm^2 or 700 mm^2 for the same price what difference does it make to the consumer, especially when the denser process will run the same given less power? The hard part about making good chips is, after all, not using the largest amount of metal in them rather the amount of logic and relative performance of said logic vs other implementations. Ultimately this leads to perf/dollar.