I don't buy them for bragging rights, I buy them because I want to future proof my builds. Idgaf about anyone knowing anything about my builds or costs. I simply want performance and quality. Don't generalize.
Conceding second place to a card that doesn't even fucking exist, that will be following up a massive failure which can't produce numbers anywhere near the competition at the same price point.
Sure, they're totally doing that by allowing Nvidia to waste time and money developing whaleboards that Gamers Nexus can jack off over.
I think it's more that they're unwilling. AMD goes after low hanging fruit and targets the mass market. In essence, they're willing to let NVIDIA invest in all of the new tech, and then they implement whatever gets popular.
So unless they decide to truly prioritize their GPU business, they'll be happy to target the quiet majority who care mostly about price to performance while focusing on innovating on the CPU side of the business where they make their real money.
I'm sure they could compete on the GPU side if they threw money at the problem, but they don't see a need to when it's decently popular and they're seeing a lot more growth and profit on the CPU side.