"Punished" implies a moral valence to the whole thing which isn't there. It's not like the AI companies were aware of gamers and set out to do this. You simply got run over, like everyone else in front of the trillion dollar bulldozer.

GPUs before crypto had a lot less amount of VRAM. Crypto investment funded a lot of stupid experiments, of which some did stick to the wall. I don't think gamers had lives completely ruined by crypto in the end.

So what?

Why gamers must be the most important group?