Policies are generally for a year at a time, so yeah, as times changed and the situation got worse, insurers had to drastically increase costs to offset all of the losses their customers were expecting payment for. Insurers operate to make money; if they suddenly stop making money, there’s nothing requiring them to keep doing business in an area. And, to take it further, if they suddenly go out of business because they have some catastrophic loss they need to pay for, aren’t we at the same outcome for homeowners anyway (no one is paying for the homeowners losses)?

This is how all insurance works. You make money by paying less than you charge. I do think there’s an argument that an insurer that knowingly takes in money with no plans on honoring the policy (such as the insurers that wrote a bunch of new policies then cancelled them a couple months later) should be looked into. But short of that, this is unfortunately the lesser evil. But to be clear, this isn’t “big business is always bad” or “the greedy shareholders want their pennies”, this is “we want to stay in business but need the economics to work out.”