TL;DW:
- bottlenecks can easily be found with the new 8GB 9060 XT
- game developers have voiced that 8GB GPUs "have become a nightmare for them" when it comes to optimizing next gen titles.
- a considerable amount of dev time is wasted due to optimizing for 8GB GPUs.
- as consumers shouldn't have to buy brand new GPUs only to find themselves screwed due to the unnecessary VRAM limitation; many gamers and reviewers are now pushing back against AMD and NVIDIA.
I agree that 8GB start to be tight, but I also don't like this 'woe us' image of poor struggling developers; if your game can't run decently on a monster like the 4090, you did something wrong.
I think the real problem here, for devs anyways, is that you have people that have 8gb and people that have 16gb, and everything in between, which makes optimizing much harder than they'd want unlike a stable target like a console.
The realer problem is more probably the bosses and directors etc. breathing on the devs' necks and pushing for release, not letting them cook a good system that uses well any amount of memory.