Because the company you are buying from what doing the minimum to achieve the "Pasture Raised Organic" label, which is not a very high bar. These laws impact them just as much as the "budget eggs".
To be a "free-range" or "pasture-raised" chicken you simply need access to the outdoors. So, these animals are kept in the same cramped, feces-filled hothouses that the "budget chickens" are, but there's a tiny hole in the side of the barn where they can access a tiny bit of grass. That's it.
There is no incentive for these companies to do anything above the bare minimum; you will never find a large-scale egg supplier that raises chickens in the idyllic environment you may picture in your head.
I hate HN sometimes. You are being downvoted for being one of the only people in this thread that has actual direct experience on this matter due to political beliefs.
Organic/Free range labeling is almost an outright scam. Very few operations (almost guaranteed to not be one you see in your grocery store) are what people imagine when they see this marketing. Most operations you could not tell the difference between chickens raised for that label vs. the "factory farm" operation across the street.
Source: family is organic market garden farmers, sells free range eggs. Organic labeling is one of the biggest scams I've ever personally witnessed.
If you actually care about this (almost no one does, they just say they do), you need to buy eggs direct from the source. Period. There is no other way to get what you are imagining.
They're all basically the same. Different labeling groups have different requirements, it doesn't really matter. The fact of the matter is that the business is going to do whatever it takes to make as much money as possible, and that means less space and freedom for the animals. You can come up with as many requirements as you want, but the egg producers, like any business, will do as little as they possibly can do to meet them. It's just not possible to treat these animals with empathy when your job is to take from them as much as you can while giving them as little as you can.
As bare as these requirements are, they only exist because without them there is literally no reason to try. And even with them, there is only the incentive to legally meet the requirements, nothing else. The labels are for us, not the chickens.
To be a "free-range" or "pasture-raised" chicken you simply need access to the outdoors. So, these animals are kept in the same cramped, feces-filled hothouses that the "budget chickens" are, but there's a tiny hole in the side of the barn where they can access a tiny bit of grass. That's it.
There is no incentive for these companies to do anything above the bare minimum; you will never find a large-scale egg supplier that raises chickens in the idyllic environment you may picture in your head.