I like many gamers would have happy bought a 2080 super/ti card if it had remained in production.
Have you forgotten what the RTX 2080 Ti was selling for right before the RTX 3000 series came out? You would have paid $1,200 for a card that was matched by a $500 card less than a month later. There's no way that you'd have been happy and there's no way that nVidia would have sold it for a lower price.
I remember the rage that new RTX 2080 Ti owners had when it was shown that the RTX 3070 essentially matched its performance for half the price. I can't say that I completely blame them. I mean, I was laughing that someone would pay that for a video card at the time (there was no shortage yet) so it was kinda their fault but nVidia made sure that they kept their lips sealed so that the rest of the RTX 2080 Ti cards got sold.
Remember that nVidia (like everyone else who isn't Inte) is a fabless semiconductor company so they weren't actually producing the chips, TSMC was. They couldn't keep producing the RTX 2080 Ti because TSMC wasn't using that process anymore.
The only disadvantage that the RTX 3070 had compared to the RTX 2080 Ti (and it was a HUGE disadvantage) was the paltry 8GB on the RTX 3070. That limitation will ensure that the RTX 3070 (and 3080 for that matter) become obsolete long before the RX 6700 XT (12GB), RX 6800 (16GB) and RX 6800 XT (also 16GB).
This is also why ATi stopped the production of the R9 Fury (Fiji), despite the fact that it out-performed the RX 580 (Polaris) by quite a margin. I myself was wondering why ATi stopped Fiji when Polaris, while more efficient, overall had like an 8-10% performance deficit compared to the Fury in Hitman 2016. A die-shrunk Fiji GPU would have been MUCH faster but AMD had decreed that it wanted ATi to make a GPU that used less juice the priority and since they own ATi, ATi complied.
Yeah, the shortage sucks but don't look at the past with rose-coloured glasses because nVidia's green colour is extremely appropriate. They are the snakes of the tech world.