For campaign based games like DND and other RPGs I'd agree, but with the specific examples of MTG and 40k I highly disagree. You do not need to meet regularly for MTG (card) or 40k (miniature) style games as they can easily be played as one-offs. While RPGs have one-shots they are far less common and the overhead is quite high compared to MTG/40k (just show up with your deck/army). In addition to this, games like MTG and 40k are often played 1v1 (though can expand) and this makes the scheduling problem easier since you only need to find compatible times for 2 people rather than 3-5 (or more).
I was in a similar boat, though for a long time during university I shared a collection with a friend and we did a pretty good job at selling off stuff to keep the effective costs down.
Since 2016, I stopped playing heavily rotational formats like Standard [for those unfamiliar, there's many different formats of MTG which are played and 'Standard' is one of the most popular ones in which you can play "all the mainline cards released from the last X sets", normally ~2 years worth], and moved to Modern [all cards printed since mid-2003 are playable]. My hope was that because of the longer (and growing) availability of cards, Modern would be more affordable in the long term - since decks would remain viable for long periods of time (perhaps with small adjustments with new cars coming out).
Then over ~20 months, that view changed a lot. First Wizards banned Oko & Mox Opal in January 2020. Firstly, these cards lost value directly - but they also caused quite a big shift in the metagame to the point where entire decks got awful, and hence less valuable. Then in mid-2021 they released the Modern Horizons 2 set, which had a massive impact on very many Modern decks (per MTGGoldfish, 8 of the 10 most commonly played creatures in the Modern metagame at the moment are from Modern Horizons 2). Once again, this totally decimated the value of many existing cards.
I hate the sort of "MTG Finance" approach to the MTG scene, but like you say - it's hard to justify $30/hr for a hobby, and its clear that Hasbro will print whatever it takes to maximize their profits (even if it has a significant negative impact on existing customers).
That would seem the biggest way to stick it to WotC: devalue their artificial scarcity while still enjoying the game.
The main limiting factor is what you can convince folks to play. Game stores have the main formats, and unknown amounts of money spent, but you can do whatever with your friends!
I think I may be done, though. The power and complexity creep has gotten to me in the past few years. I can understand that cards need to be rebalanced, or that new rules get introduced over time, but the complexity of the current version of the game has gotten out of hand. The cynic in me says that the power creep is there so that people playing formats like modern will pay for new sets, and since the new cards are more powerful and have more abilities, it drags down the game.
But there is something to be said about games produced by companies that don't rely upon a constant revenue stream (MtG, e.g.) to enjoy.
There's a thriving comunity out there, and so far I've been welcome with open arms every time I've reached out.
I'm not sure that's true. The actual bottleneck with these games is not money but time and interest: you have to have a group of people who all like the same game, and you have to be able to get the group together regularly to play it. There are plenty of people who are interested, but I suspect that the vast majority of them are already players of whatever game they favor (if they haven't switched to something like World of Warcraft--see below), so I don't know that there's a lot of untapped market share.
As for getting the group together to play, when all of the players are teenagers in school or college, that's relatively easy. It gets a lot harder when people are adults and have to work, pay mortgages, deal with various curve balls that adult life always throws at you, etc. And if you know you're not going to be able to devote the time to it that you used to as a kid when you learned the games (I started playing D&D in eighth grade, and spent far more hours playing it between then and graduating from high school than I have in all the years since--and my 40 year high school reunion is this year), it gets a lot harder to justify spending money on game materials.
Another factor is the availability of online games like World of Warcraft, which I mentioned above. These games solve the time and interest problem in a way that can't help scaling much better than in person tabletop play: you can play from your computer at home and there are always other people online playing. There are also limitations, of course: for example, you can't make up your own adventures and you can't have house rules, which were both features of every D&D campaign I have ever encountered. But it's another factor that I think tends to limit the size of the available market for games like D&D.
All of the above factors seem to me to indicate that there is a natural limit to the size of the market for games like the ones WoTC is producing, and the actual active market is close to that limiting size. If that's true, then the option of trying to make more money by scaling instead of markup simply isn't available to them.