I... am an econometrician, programmer and hardcore gamer, rofl.

Yeah, watching this has been fucking insane.

I used to work for a major international logistics company, made the reports for C Suite.

I guarantee you people at my old firm were literally pulling out their hair when the de minimis exemption got annulled.

... anyway, as far as PC builds go?

Here's the best possible bang for your buck, as far as I can tell:

Minisforum BD790i se, + RX 9070.

Put that, a 600W PSU, 32 gb sys ram, 1 or 2 TB SSD, and a big ole fan on top of the cpu, all inside an ITX lunchbox?

~$1500, and that'll get you over 60 fps on nearly anything, at nearly any settings level, at 1440p. Most games you'll be over 90 or 120fps.

Its more or less a Steam Machine on steroids.

... presuming you are running Linux, lol.