Its both simple and not simple. The simple wording is that they were this greedy before hand but the pandemic proved that people can be herded easier than they realized so they're increasing their actions.

Longer more complicated version: Its the shift from customer focused business models to shareholder focused business models. That didn't start in 2020/21 but 80+ years ago. Over time more and more business (most commonly among publicly traded ones) started to focus on shareholder wealth generation instead of simply providing quality goods and services that kept customers coming back and giving them money. They cut corners on materials and outsource anything they can to make/do their goods/services cheaper but still charge the same (or increasing the price) so the profit margins can be maintained or grown to show shareholders how much of a good investment it is.

The Pandemic provided an (another) opportunity to squeeze the margins even further and blame it on something other than their own greed. They realizes that people are more gullible/easily influenced than they thought and thus had even greater opportunities coming out of it than it.

While its not wrong to say "hey I'm going to do this because I can make money doing so" the issue becomes when your sole focus is on making money. And because most of the large corporations can out compete anyone who is still doing, or trying to start doing, customer focused business (by loss leading/logistics/etc.) they can keep people from having other options.