I don't know how much of a conspiracy that is. If the current trend of hardware costs keep rising to the point of pricing people out of having any real compute locally, and chip makers actively de-prioritizing consumer-grade memory, GPUs, etc, companies will (more) heavily push thin clients and streaming for everything.

I really don’t see it happening at all, not with current trends, you can barely run Win11 on 8GB ram anymore

This kind of makes my point. Consumers won't be able to run things locally, so you end up with Win11 in the cloud and your device is just a glorified browser because that's all you can afford.

I would have laughed at the thought a few years ago, but now I am slowly starting to adopt some of the viewpoints of American second amendment hardliners.

It's just unfortunate that producing a half decent computing platform is significantly more difficult than a rifle (and that in the case of said hardliners, the capital is backing them, here it's working against us).

Why would component vendors allow shortages to continue indefinitely for the benefit of hyperscalers and AI companies, especially given what may be years of pent-up demand in other markets?