I was mostly kidding but I think we have to assume as a given that Nvidia knew exactly how powerful their 3000 series was for mining Ethereum at launch, and therefore the demand was going to be off the charts even if gamers didn't want them.
If there is a real conspiracy I think it's that they essentially used miners to fix prices for consumers, which also benefited AMD who basically followed what Nvidia was doing, because why wouldn't you. This would have all happened with or without the pandemic I think, the 2000's had the same problem with demand early on on a smaller scale and so did the 1000's, I know because I scalped a few 1080TI's because I could. Miners were getting rich and had more capital than ever, for a card that was more profitable than ever. They knew miners would basically bid up the price so they could charge nearly whatever they wanted at the start.
The 3080 and 3090 Dies are virtually identical too, if I'm Nvidia I'm building as few 3080's as I can and as many 3090's as I possibly can because miners will buy them all anyway, and a lot of consumers who would never have spent $1500 when a $700 card with 90% of the same performance ended up with 3090s because that's all they could find.
Edit: Oh and the reason for my conspiracy theory was that I thought it was funny that Intel is going to launch their GPUs into a market that JUST got done being red hot. Kudos to Nvidia and AMD if they somehow engineered that.