Yeah, it's a tough break. My unhelpful advice here would be like anything else with gaming: there will always be bigger, better, newer, but that doesn't make your experience worse, and a 4070 Ti should be good for another few years at least at 1440.
From Nvidia's perspective, this is probably more a response to some softness at certain GPU tiers and essentially manufacturing efficiencies. Not that it excuses price hikes over the past few years. Like I mentioned, unfortunately gamers have reacted well to the 4070 Ti and some other not great cards. When I'm looking at actual sales volume (not just shipments) in the US, 4070 Ti has done really well. In one year on the prebuild market, it's sold only a few thousand less than RTX 3070 Ti did during its entire lifespan. Or for a current gen reference, it's sold more than 4080 and 4090 combined, and not that far behind 4070.