It’s funny you don’t hear Porsche, Lamborghini and Ferrari making the same dire claims!
The audiophile hobby only has the manufactures and audio magazines to blame for this demise of our hobby. Have you been to an audio show lately or read a later audio magazine? The last show I attended had new manufacturers making products that cost 4x to 10x more than a competitor of just a few years ago. Same goes for the products that the audio mags promote as the best ever when I have listened to these products and others costing 1/5 as much and preferred the cheaper model. I was comparing a speaker that was going to cost me over $100k and preferred the $23k speaker.
Back in the 90’s and 2000’s when CES/The show were the best, audio products were more reasonable, still expensive but achievable.
Porsche and Lamborghini for example can charge $1M for a car and they will s ll out, and nobody claims Porsche charges too much, except for the people that can’t afford them.