It can mine , they were nerfed only for ethereum, but there are other coins people are mining and also it only nerfs it by 50% for ethereum, so still profitable.
Also yes I agree there are other things at play, it's called gamers and people needing a cheap gpu, remember the 60's range are the most popular range for the average user of GPUs for gaming, just to produce a display on systems with no IGPU and work.
This whole mining thing is just nuts to me and sooner it ends the better but again it may not and become the new reality of life. We can only hope it dies a terrible death and no one ever tries to bring any form of this back again.
looking at the stock levels NOT coming in to the uk id say mining at least here has very little to do with it, its just the total lack of stock be it from nvidia making gpu's or 3rd party card manufacturers just not shipping any to the uk.