I fell out of love with PC gaming around 2004 or so because of how frustratingly fast components became outdated. I spent a *lot* of money building a new PC with an AMD 64 3200+ and a GeForce 6800 Ultra I had to import from Germany, because all you could get in Spain was the 6800 GT, and I really really wanted that ultra. First GPU ever that cost me more than 450-ish Euro. So I built this supposedly state of the art PC and then it almost couldn't run Doom 3. It struggled with a LOT of games I threw at it, and that made me really sour on PC gaming. I completely stopped gaming on PC in 2008, and moved to Xbox 360.
In 2014 I got the itch to get a new PC after seeing how awesome Alien Isolation looked on PC, and after seeing Assetto Corsa, then a PC exclusive.
Near Christmas 2014 I built a new PC with an i5 4690k and an AMD R9 290. Sold that AMD GPU after a few weeks because of how unbelievably loud the blower fan noise of that card was, and got a GTX 970.
Bought a GTX 1070 on release, so mid 2016.
In 2016 someone traded my PC for one with an i7 6700 and another GTX 1070 (the guy had a reference 1070 and really wanted my MSI card).
In 2018 I sold my mainboard and CPU combo, and for a small difference I upgraded to a used combo of an i7 6700k with a really nice mainboard.
In 2019 I sold the GTX 1070 and got a GTX 1080.
Early 2020 I sold the GTX 1080 and put away the money to save it towards an RTX 3080. Went PS4 only for six months.
In November 2020 I managed to snag an RTX 3080.
In January this year I upgraded my CPU to an i5 12600k, and got a way too expensive Z690 mainboard, and some fancy Corsair RGB RAM.
Happy to game on PC again, and while I have swapped a lot of stuff in a short time after gaming on PC again (Damn you, PC gaming!), I feel that by lowering settings and such, you can keep PC components for a much longer time than you could 15 years ago before they are hopelessly outdated.