Chinese mobile carriers used to (and may still) do exactly this. Numbers with multiple 8’s were more valuable because 8 is lucky, whereas a single 4 (a homophone for “death”) meant a reasonable discount.

It's also a thing with US-based numbers, e.g. repeating digits. However, the pricing not variable year over year, and may even be only a one-time fee if at all. Once you are assigned the number, it's yours and the annual reservation price doesn't change significantly.

This instance is straight up Google acting in bad faith with the bait and switch. Are they really that desperate to make a few extra bucks? What PM decided this was a good idea?

Day by day, Big-G is burning every ounce of public goodwill they ever had, speedily on their way to sinking down to FB Meta territory.

I'm pretty sure it's TLD-wide basically all/most of the time.

It's usually a choose your own frontend registrar for the TLD. Whether that is Gandi, Namecheap, Google Domains, Cloudflare, etc.

But the TLDs fix the price underneath, registrars are just resellers.

One can argue scalpers expecting 3000 for a domain means the domain is premium-enough to be worth that renewal.