We’re living in a golden age of affordable mechanical keyboards

Absolutely, particularly at the low end. I got my first "modern" mechanical around 2015ish. Tray mount, Micro-USB, exposed switches, steel plate, the worst bluetooth that ever bluetoothed, soldered-in Outemu Blues, gamer backlight caps, and cost me around $50 for a 70% layout, though admittedly with real RGB (through hole diodes, btw). I got some new keycaps because I really just freakin' HAD to, but they were laser-marked OEM profile in "pearl and pebble" except for a single red ESC key, and I think they were a good $20-$25 on their own. Nicer stuff was available from Taiwanese brands or Das Keyboard, but options were still distinctly limited, and only the deepest rabbit-hole dwellers were importing ornate aluminum customs from South Korea.

Now, for $35 you can get a very nice looking gasket-mount hotswap 75% or TKL with a variety of switch choices and perfectly reasonable keycaps, and potentially even open source firmware. Get up to $60 and you can find one that also has a CNC aluminum case. That same $20-25 keycap budget opens a world of very neat keycaps; clones and no names to be sure, but all manner of shapes and colorways, and certainly much higher quality than I managed on my Drevo Calibur v1... which I do still have, LOL. The custom and semi-custom scene is so immense that old-timers wax nostalgic about how it used to be hard to find what you wanted and now there's no "hunt" to the hobby, outside vintage collectors.

Honestly, as desktop computers become more niche for creative and gaming use cases, the people using them will sort of by-definition be at least a bit of an enthusiast of some sort, so peripherals that skew a little to the higher end makes sense, though on the flip side that could eventually get ridiculous if PCs stop being a large market in their own right. We're kind of in a sweet spot right now.

Very true, thanks for sharing