> companies that can afford inflated prices will take advantage of the situation to pull ahead of competitors who can't afford tech at inflated tech

These big companies are competing with each other, and they're willing and able to spend much more for compute/RAM than we are.

> I don’t know what we can do as normal people other than making do with the hardware we have and boycotting Big Tech, though I don’t know how effective the latter is.

A few ideas:

* Use/develop/optimise local tooling

* Pool resources with friends/communities towards shared compute.

I hope prices drop sooner than projects dev tools all move to the cloud.

It's not all bad news: as tooling/builds move to the cloud, they'll become available to those that have thus far been unable or unwilling to afford a fast computer to be mostly idle.

This is a loss of autonomy for those who were able to afford such machines though.