There are a couple of different things here. The 50 series launch was a bit of a paper launch, especially for the 5090. Scalping obviously happened, but the issue seems to have been very few cards being available, not as much high demand.

A different question is what the things that are available are worth and how they're selling. It's not impossible to find popular parts, but finding popular parts at MSRP is hard, with crazy markups changing day-to-day. I bought a CPU last year at MSRP and despite being a last-gen part that has since received a direct replacement, today it's 100 bucks more expensive from the same retailer.