Ironically it’s because they paid very expensive artists.
The windows 8 logo was done by Paula Scher of Pentagram, one of the most exclusive and expensive graphic design firms.
Meeting with Microsoft early in the development process, Pentagram asked: “Your name is Windows. Why are you a flag?”













Don’t forget this market insanity started around COVID, and has basically been succeeded by consequent crises with few dips.
The typical release cadence of PC components is around 4-6 years, which requires new motherboard, CPU, and RAM.
Adding in the GPU basically results in a new build, and that’s being generous assuming no upgrades/changes to other parts like PSU and storage.
My take is that a lot of these people wishing to upgrade are those who have simply been holding out since 2020 or earlier. This seems to vaguely match up with the Steam Hardware results, with a fair number of people still using RTX 3000 series or RX 6000 series, of which even the top end cards are starting to become par/outperformed by their modern mid level counterparts.