Maybe there was a pattern of brand-loyal, sufficiently rich gamers who made a hobby out of building a new system at the very top end of AMDs offerings whenever a new generation Radeons came out. Those would not find an excuse for an upgrade this year because the latest generation of Radeons tops out lower than previous generations.
But this explanation attempt breaks down completely when I try to back it up with the numbers from the article. The way I understand them, the average AMD/AMD system has actually become more expensive, suggesting that AMD lost more at the low end. But I have similar problems with the main conclusion of the article: what I see in those tables is that the Radeon fraction has dropped faster on Intel machines than on AMD CPUs. With this in mind I would rather conclude that brand loyalty is even more important for AMD than it used to be, it's just that with shrinking general popularity of Radeons, the CPUs get less of a helping hand.
This is a significant difference, because Intel has a 17.48% marketshare on graphics per the Steam Hardware Survey [1] (the original source for the spreadsheet data), while AMD has a 23.46% share -- which includes both their integrated and discrete graphics.
The average price of AMD builds has risen because the lowest-end builds on the Intel side can rely on Intel's integrated graphics. Intel integrated GPUs attain one or two percent share of all GPUs for each generation, while AMD APUs are far behind.
The FM2-based products are alright, but they are glorified laptop processors and they do not really compete well in the desktop market overall. Nice if you want a decent iGPU but most people use discrete GPUs for any serious gaming, and without the iGPU all you have is a mediocre CPU.
AMD's future in the CPU market rests heavily with Zen. Right now they essentially do not compete for the vast majority of users (power-sensitive mobile/server market, productivity users, or gaming). They run the games, the averages are sometimes decent, but the minimum frametimes suffer pretty badly and they use a lot of power. Compare the 99th-percentile frametimes and the cumulative frametime charts here (both are "badness" metric for measuring stutter) and you can see that AMD's single-threaded performance really torpedoes some games far beyond expectations. The FX-8350's 99th-percentile frametimes are significantly worse than a Pentium G2130 and it even falls behind a dual-core Clarkdale (first-gen Core i5).
http://techreport.com/review/23750/amd-fx-8350-processor-rev...
AMD's GPU products, on the other hand, are still reasonably competitive - although their top product only competes with a GTX 1070 and is very low on VRAM capacity during a time when VRAM consumption is increasing rapidly and will continue to do so (particularly DX12 and Vulkan games). The RX 480 is a solid card though, especially for the price, and the Fury is due for a refresh soon with the new Vega series, which will undoubtedly have more VRAM.
In particular, there's a problem with combining AMD GPUs and AMD CPUs. AMD's GPU driver stack has a reputation for being single-threaded and somewhat inefficient - so you really need good single-threaded performance with AMD GPUs more than ever before, and Intel processors are very much the preferred pairing. Again, this difference is particularly pronounced when comparing minimum frametimes rather than averages.
They have been working hard on cleaning this up with Crimson and they made another big driver refresh recently too - but AFAIK there's still a pretty significant quality-of-life improvement from using Intel processors with your AMD GPU due to minimum frametime improvements.
Conversely NVIDIA's driver stack has a reputation for being less dependent on good single-threaded CPU performance. So perversely, if you are running on an AMD CPU then you are best off getting an NVIDIA GPU.
Also, side note: AM1 is my favorite AMD CPU platform right now by far. The CPU supports ECC, most motherboards don't but the Asus AM1M-A does. It makes a nice little NAS box if you can forgive its paltry 2 onboard SATA channels and mATX footprint, and you can pick up a CPU+mobo for $45 from MicroCenter.