I still have a few older sticks of DDR4 from various older projects, and AM4 boards and CPUs are still decently priced… at least relative to newer stuff. In any case, most games aren’t going to need DDR5 for a long time, and so long as you aren’t bothering with ray tracing to any significant degree older GPUs are still competitive. The only thing that’s required these days is an SSD, and it’s not as though those haven’t been around forever at this point.

It sucks yeah, not being able to even consider newer parts, but it is what it is.