It's pretty obvious now that the time for cheaper Threadripper chips and platforms is over
Hard to be a hobbyist when the time for 'cheaper' 'is over' From a marketing standpoint you may be right, but technically there would seem to be room halfway between AM5 and Epyc given that their core counts, pcie lane count, and memory bandwidth are ~4x, and seem to be destined to widen rather than converge. That said, TR was always a "what if we could" effort, and with component availability being what it is, there's definitely a reason to expect at least a temporary absence. I suspect that's the real reason we're not getting a TR this round.
That said, I have zero interest in desktop Epyc (server guys don't value half of the things that I do), so if that's the way we go, I'll mourn bitterly, but life moves on.