The fear here then, is if gaming consoles get better then developers will push graphics further. You're both right in that I could cut back on pricing by getting older parts or earlier versions. This then cuts back on length of life of the hardware - as in it will fall behind due to consoles pushing the graphical envelope.
I'm a new PC gamer, 33 yrs old, but new. Always been on console. My expectation was that PC's were always graphically better with quicker speeds. It just doesn't seem like the gap is as large as I thought. (Granted I'm only talking gaming, and the pricing of these PC parts could be skewing things a bit)
I should say that the build mentioned above really comes out to about 1300-1400$ if you don't add the monitor/sound/mouse/keyboard/software. So thats an Xbox and PS5!