The last time they had plenty of stock and cards people wanted to buy at the same time was the RX 200 series. They sold lots of cards, but part of the reason people wanted them was because they were priced fairly low because the cards were sold with low margins, so they didn't make a huge amount of money, helping to subsidise their CPU division when it was making a loss, but not more.

Shortly after this generation launched Litecoin ASIC mining hardware became available, so suddenly the used market was flooded with these current-generation cards, making it make little sense to buy a new one for RRP, so towards the end of the generation, the cards were sold new at a loss just to make space. That meant they needed to release the next generation cards to convince people to buy them, but as they were just a refresh generation (basically the same GPUs but clocked higher and with lower model numbers with only the top-end Fury card being new silicon) it was hard to sell 300-series cards when they cost more than equivalent 200-series ones.

That meant they had less money to develop Polaris and Vegas than they wanted, so they ended up delayed. Polaris sold okay, but was only available as low-margin low-end cards, so didn't make a huge amount of money. Vega ended up delayed by so long that Nvidia got an entire extra generation out, so AMD's GTX 980 competitor ended up being an ineffective GTX 1070 competitor, and had to be sold for much less than planned, so again, didn't make much money.

That problem compounded for years until Nvidia ran into their own problems recently.

It's not unreasonable to claim that AMD graphics cards being in stock at the wrong time caused them a decade of problems.

It's a huge gamble for manufacturers to order a large allocation of wafers a year in advance of actual retail sales. The market can shift considerably in that time. They probably didn't expect Nvidia to shit the bed so badly.

Wait, are you saying if they had more product, they could sell more product?

Sounds like voodoo economics to me!

I had luck with Microcenter last week (if you have one near you); checked their website at my preferred location and they had 9070 XTs in stock, went after work and I got one.