Yes, they were, and that highlights the problem really. Nvidia’s grip on mind share is so strong that AMD releasing cards that matched or exceeded at the top end didn’t actually matter and you still have people saying things like the comment you responded to.

It’s actually incredible how quickly the discourse shifted from ray tracing being a performance hogging gimmick and DLSS being a crutch to them suddenly being important as soon as AMD had cards that could beat Nvidia’s raster performance.