Honestly, I never expected anything else to happen. With all these ads, loading bars, extremely high domain prices... of course people take all measures to drive prices up. There are even worse people (that are probably/hopefully not affiliated with Godaddy etc.) that just register interesting domains to sell them at some point to someone who actually uses the domain.
Domain name registration is quite broken and should probably be quasi-regulated in a way TLS certificate registration is.
Domain name registration is quite broken and should probably be quasi-regulated in a way TLS certificate registration is.