I'm building a system that comes in around $6k (closer to 7 when I add cooling). How do you suggest I save $3-4k?
Assuming you are talking about a system intended primarily for gaming, which is what they were referring to there, I wouldn't go with a 32-core, 64-thread HEDT processor where a majority of the cores are likely to never get utilized by games within the usable life of the system. I have some doubts that games will be making heavy use of more than 8 cores with 16 threads for some years, and one can get that with a $320 Ryzen 3700X on a ~$200 X570 AM4 motherboard. Or if you feel you must have more cores, there are 12 and 16-core models on the same AM4 platform for $500 and $750 respectively, but again, I wouldn't expect those extra cores to see much use in games for quite a while. And if it did turn out that certain games showed some benefit from those 12+ core processors down the line, you could always upgrade to one then, probably at a reduced cost.
Or go with a $500 i9-9900K or 9900KS with 8 cores and 16 threads with slightly better per-core performance in games, at least when paired with a high-end graphics card at relatively low resolutions. At high resolutions like 4K in modern games with the settings turned up, all of these CPUs should perform relatively similar though, as the 2080 Ti should be the limiting factor for performance most of the time.
I would not go with a $300 1TB SSD for gaming either, as it's not likely to improve game loading times noticeably over a model costing less than half as much. If I was to spend over $200 on an SSD, I would rather have one with double the capacity then one that gets slightly-higher performance, at least for a gaming build where a bunch of large games are likely to be installed.