Doing the most simple price-based enquiry a 16Gb card is 2.5-4x the 1660 price I'm looking at or 2-3x the 3050 - so neither is going to happen

As the year goes by, the current generation of 8GB cards should remain around their present prices, and start dropping towards the end of the year, start of next. Pretty much every review slams them as being a waste of money for gaming, and less than 32GB of VRAM is of no interest for AI/ML work, so they're not interested either.

Later this year (or very early next) NVidia are expected to release "Super" versions of their current models- basically the present model with more VRAM. Depending on availability, that should put downward pressure on the current models, and even more downward pressure on the 8GB models.
The RTX 5060 (145W) or RTX 5060Ti 8GB (180W) version would be the sort of thing you'd be looking at (or AMD RX 9060 (132W) RX 9060XT 8GB (150W)). Don't consider any of the previous generations 60 series unless they come with a huge discount, or it's a higher end model with a good discount on the equivalent current model (the RTX 3050 8GB you mentioned? RTX 5060 Ti 8GB has 3 times it's performance). Don't bother with anything less than the RTX 5060 (same with AMD) performance wise unless it's mind bogglingly cheap (in which case there's a good chance it's a scam. Of course, what you can afford v what is good value don't always come even remotely close).
Nvidia are ending new driver support for the 1000 series cards later this year, support for the 2000 series cards is expected to end later next year.

Of course, depending on what Russia, Israel, China & Trump do, anything could happen. Economies could collapse and prices collapse. Or economies could boom even higher, then collapse, but prices go through the roof (even higher and faster than now).

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Grant
Darwin NT