I think you're agreeing with OP, namely that it's not battery usage that is causing the price hike, it's time of day that's causing it and the battery life is correlated.

I've heard so many people say they think iPhones are 'listening to them talk' because they'll talk about some product then go on Instagram/Google and see an advertisement for that type of product. Obviously they were just targeted really well and missed some other data connection.

Humans are good at pattern matching to notice trends but non-technical people always tend to blame something higher up in the stack, like the device in their hand. Or jump to something more malicious by the all-knowing powerful big tech companies.

they don't. I think you are just misunderstanding the comment. The poster was saying people might assume its related to battery level since it is correlated to time of day, which does have an effect on prices.

He was making a comment about wrongly thinking causation from the situation