> Nvidia doesn't earn more money when cards are sold above MSRP, but they get almost all the hate for it. Why would they set themselves up for that?

If you believe their public statements, because they didn't want to build out additional capacity and then have a huge excess supply of cards when demand suddenly dried up.

In other words, the charge of "purposefully keeping stock low" is something NVidia admitted to; there was just no theory of how they'd benefit from it in the present.