I mean, the supply shortage was a big problem for people that just wanted to play a game. My GPU died and I had to buy a used RTX Titan (in the 3090 era) just to have anything. (It's great though, I use it for gaming, ray tracing, and machine learning. Still looking forward to the 40xx series though.)

And that's the second time they've done this, after 2018 crypto crash.

third. there was another mining boom back in 2014 when it was bitcoin being gpu-mined. It fucked with AMD's Hawaii/290X launch really badly back then - the cards were unobtanium for months and months which gave NVIDIA an opening to launch Maxwell. Then the prices crashed and miners dumped their inventory, so you had new aftermarket 290Xs being sold for $250-300 to try and compete with mining cards, with used/refurb 290 non-X bottoming out around $175.

I'm sure the idea that infinity cache decreases the relative mining performance was in everyone's minds at AMD when they were designing RDNA2 - by that point they'd had two major launches (vega too) fucked up by mining, and using more cache/less VRAM bandwidth makes your mining performance worse relative to raster, because mining loads aren't cachable.