It's hard to talk today about something to buy next year. Shit changes fast.
AMD vs Intel: AMD is pretty much king right now, though Intel does better at single-threaded stuff. AMD just dropped the Ryzen 5xxx cpus which are nutso awesome.
RAM: 16 is bare minimum now. 32 is what I'd recommend.
HDD: Anything less than an NVME drive is throwing away money. NVME is the way and the light. A 1tb NVME is super affordable. 2tb is becoming reasonable.
Graphics: Nvidia and AMD *just* released new gen stuff that is blowing the socks off previous stuff. Major huge generational gap here. Also super hard to actually get your hands on. AMD is a bit better for pure raster performance, but as soon as stuff like raytracing and DLSS is factored in, they're not even really comparable. As an AMD fan: go Nvidia for now. But anything less than a 3xxx card is not advised. 3060s should be coming out not too far off and that should be a really sweet spot for price-performance while still getting all the eyecandy.
Monitors: high refresh is good - at least 144hz. I hate curved (ymmv). 1440p is the sweet spot for resolution. You can do with less if you must, but if you want to go higher you're gonna need to fork out for the GPU to push it. IPS panels are my favorite. VA can sorta look good, but avoid TN. HDR is awesome but pricey. Gsync is *amazing* but crazy expensive, but freesync is less so and increasingly compatible with Nvidia GPUs.
Motherboard: matters, but how much so depends on what you're doing. A B550 mobo will be the most cost effective (assuming AMD CPU) and do everything you'll probably need.
PSU: depends on everything else. Stick to good brands and don't cheap out. Get enough wattage to match your use (EVGA and others have calculators on their websites you can use as guidelines).
VR: I can't begin to talk about what's needed here. I've not looked into it at all. I assume this means bigger, beefier GPU though.
There's my initial 2 second response... Hope it helps to start...
