During COVID, I'd have preferred to be able to buy a roll of toilet paper for $5 than to have the price unchanged but the stores totally sold out for weeks.
In Ohio rare bottles are sold at retail pricing and you join a lottery to be able to purchase one. Secondary prices are $1,000 for a $100 bottle. We could just let people who are willing to wait to be first in line buy bottles and then sell them at higher prices - that's market efficiency, but we've decided that kind of sucks and instead we've decided to enact a lottery instead and open the bottles so you can't resell them as easily. Most people are pretty happy with the results. It's not efficient but that's ok.
I think parking falls under a similar purview, except that the government is heavily involved in parking schemes. As an example, the promotion of the usage of gas-powered vehicles and the automobile industry, which require us to go to war and things to secure supplies. There's very little that is efficient about that market and the usage of the vehicles is extremely subsidies, you're only noticing the immediate cost when you go and have to pay pricing for peak/off-peak hours. Other goods and services are more efficient and/or less necessary, so there's different pricing schemes that we like as a society.
The main problem with economics as a field is that it assumes "good" and/or rational behavior. But markets and the economy are just one aspect of society. We intentionally make trade-offs all the time because we like the results, even if they aren't efficient.
It’s not really a good comparison and doesn’t seem predatory at all.
But also if you consider it predatory then you wouldn’t want to advocate or defend the expansion of the practice into other areas.