Futureproofing is absolutely a thing. There's a reason people buy 4090s and it's so they can go as long as possible without having to care about turning down settings and still get stupid high FPS.

The term futureproofing has been so twisted to literally mean never upgrade, which is literally not what anyone thinks yet everyone who lambasts the concept somehow uses this as the fulcrum of their argument.

Buying a higher wattage PSU knowing you will do a 3-5 year refresh to your system, a PCIE5.0 supported motherboard, are perfect examples. And before anyone says "but PCIE isn't even close to being maxed out" and then cite a 4090, the 4090 is by far the worse example to test PCIE limitations. The dud 6500xt is a great example of this and matters more on more VRAM choked cards (Nvidia 4060s show significant drops once VRAM is maxed out on lower PCIE slots.)

Then the same people will spend an extra 200 USD on GPUs with 3-10% increase from the tier lower but not care about the 3-10% potential losses from a lower end PCIE slot and claim how PCIE somehow isn't relevant yet.

So with that in mind a futureproofed board, an excellent motherboard platform (currently AM5) + a good PSU = more money saved in the long run with better performance in the long run.