Years ago (I am 60 so I'm going back many years), cameras were affordable. It seems to me that nowadays, cameras are totally out of the price range for just about everyone unless you are willing to rack up your credit card debt sky high. Included is the price of lenses and accessories as well.
Camera manufacturers need to get back to the basics of affordable products. Even smartphones are now priced out of reach for most folk.
The demise of camera manufacturers will come from pricing themselves out of business.
My perception is pretty much the opposite - back in the 70s you could get a very inexpensive point-and-shoot, but the interchangeable lens cameras were very definitely aspirational because they were very expensive by comparison. My first film SLR was a Minolta x-570, with a 35-105 kit lens, and it was not cheap, even on a young engineer's salary. Today's D3K and Rebel series cameras offer tremendously more capability for around the same price, adjusted for inflation ($500 today = $200 in 1983). In 1990 I replaced that with a Canon EOS-10 and 2-lens kit - a great autofocus/autowinder SLR. It was about double the price, but it had 2 autofocus lenses, so that made sense. In 2006 I replaced that with my first DSLR, a D80 with an 18-105 lens, for $1300. That started a series of body replacements every 2 years, at around $1000-$1200, with steadily increasing capability, plus a couple of lenses.
So my impression is that enthusiast cameras have always been an expensive proposition, catering to the more well-to-do middle and upper class consumers. There aren't as many of the former these days as there were 30 years ago, and their disposable income has been further eroded by the other "Necessities" of modern life. The other thing that's happened is that there are more options for taking pictures conveniently these days. 30 years ago, you had really one choice: a single-purpose tool, the camera. Most folks don't care about the craft of photography and the tools that serve that craft; hence, even back then, point-and-shoots outsold ILCs by 20:1 or more.
Now, with smartphones being so "good enough", there's little reason for most folks to buy dedicated cameras - regardless of price; they're simply too much fuss and bother for a simple task - taking a picture (and then, most of the time, sharing it). In a diminishing market, the only recourse for companies deprived of their primary income stream - consumer point and shoots - is to focus on the highest end of the market, which can tolerate the expense of such low-volume products.
Smartphones, too, are experiencing the precursor of collapse - market saturation. Already the $200-$400 class phone is calling into question the need for the $1000 superphone, and you see most of the market growth in the lower price tiers. Camera manufacturers have already started down the cost reduction path with the introduction of mirrorless products - essentially, using what they learned with the digital point and shoot to make ILCs instead of highly mechanical tools. They may not be able to go as far down the Mooresean road with ILCs as phone manufacturers have been able to.
