The difference being that Airlines and food delivery did make a profit, just figured they had to do these tricks to earn some more. Mature businesses resort to lowering quality, fake scarcity.

Here the scarcity is real, and profits are nowhere to be seen

These schemes will soon fall apart entirely when an open weight model can run on Groq/Cerebras/SambaNova at even higher speeds and be just fine for all tasks. Arguably already the case, but not many know yet.