That didn't happen in a vacuum. For a lot of us we do more than game. And there legitimately wasn't an alternative till much more recently.
For instance, for Over a decade. If you were rendering out, a hardware accelerated video through Premiere. It was likely with an Nvidia card. Raytracing, Nvidia has been king at that since long before the 2000 series. It's changing slowly. Thank goodness. I'm more than happy to be able to ditch Nvidia myself.