Nvidia focused more on the ability to perform real time ray tracing (RTX) than on the raw performance of the cards. At the time the RTX performance of the cards was hardly passable and the amount of games that even supported the technically was VERY limited but the fact that they could perform ray tracing in real time at all was a bit of a marvel.

Nvidia leaned hard into this and tried very hard to get everyone on board with this paradigm shift. As reviewers tested these cards and found out that this technology is still very immature, most of them decided to highlight the performance per dollar instead of the new technology. This meant that informed gamers didn't really consider RTX part of the equation when buying the 2000 series cards.

When you looked at it from a pure rasterization perspective the massive increase in price for the marginal increase in gains made these cards really unappealing. Especially to those who already had 1000 and even 900 series cards. As a result this was a generation a lot of gamers skipped or instead choose to go with 1600 series cards later on. These were basically 2000 series cards without the ray tracing and a cheaper price point making them more appealing.