More money for less

Nvidia's high-priced mediocrity coming soon next month:

Retailers listing these MSI pre-builts with these graphics cards and 8GB VRAM in the specs isn’t exactly out of the blue; we have covered news of leaks of the GeForce RTX 4060 and RTX 4060 Ti previously. However, there remained a tiny glimmer of hope that Nvidia and its partners might do something to prevent the release of a stunted Ada Lovelace generation 060 desktop family.

Didn't Nvidia's previous model at this tier have 12GB of VRAM?

In 2023, 8GB of VRAM is increasingly perceived as insufficient for the mainstream PC gaming enthusiast. Nvidia released the GeForce RTX 3060 with 12GB of VRAM in early 2021, and even the RTX 2060 was updated with that amount of VRAM during the height of the cryptocurrency speculation bubble.

Yup. New games are already crashing or are unplayable at atrociously low FPS with 8GB and here Nvidia cuts their VRAM from two years ago!

Also, the second-tier card in their previous generation was seriously underwhelming.

3090: 24GB
3080: 10GB
3060: 12GB

So, your game needs 12, 14 or 16GB of VRAM? Had no choice but to pay top dollar for the 3090. At least, their shareholders are happy.