Yeah... I'm sure a lot of people have been told a lot of things by their buddies, though. So now we have a lot of buddies running around with buddy answers these days.
For the PS5 to exceed the $500 mark, it has to be as expensive or more expensive than the Series X to manufacture. Short answer.....it's not. Because it's not, that places it closer to the $400 mark than the $500 mark, and that's with the disc drive. So by Sony even selling the disc version at $500, they are selling the SKU at a profit, which is not the case with the Series X. By removing the drive, Sony will more than likely break even or sell at a small loss. So any money they make off the high end SKUs will simply go towards some of the money being lost on the low end SKUs in addition to other things such as purchasing games or accessories or even games sold on PC to mitigate that impact.
People guessing are doing just that.