They didn't come out on top, they revelled in it. What brought us back to some relative normalcy was the crypto crash & Etherium's switch away from PoW; even after that, the 40 series pricing and range seems to be nVidia cashing in on the scalper prices
nvidia maintained MSRP of 30 series cards during the WFH boom and did not allow AIBs to increase prices, this was one of the main complaints from EVGA that ended up with them pulling out of the GPU market. The scalping was done by third parties.