The truth here is so simple and petty... Corporations and the psychopaths who run them saw COVID as a personal sleight, an attack on them personally. Period.

When things started to eventually "Open up" and financial numbers started to recover, it wasn't enough to just rebound, they had to take revenge on society and get rolling, record profits through gouging, shrinkflation, etc.

Really and truly, this is what happened. Even if they didn't know what was driving them necessarily, they are such broken narcissists that the motivation was/is, "You took from ME, and there are the severe and prolonged consequences for that".

100%