It seems so weird to me when people express this opinion. There was a once in a century global pandemic that so severely crushed supply chains that even car manufacturers couldn't produce cars. What do we expect Raspberry Pi to do when this happens? They apparently have both business customers and hobby customers. They made a decision to prioritize business customers, supposedly because those customers would be more likely to jump ship permanently if they could not get the supply they needed. I have no idea what the financial internals at Raspberry Pi are, but I also know that they did not cause nor want the chip shortage to happen, and it is kind of out of their hands whether such a thing happens again. So without knowing what they really should have done, why fault them for this decision?
> They made a decision to prioritize business customers, supposedly because those customers would be more likely to jump ship permanently if they could not get the supply they needed.
The correct decision would in my opinion have been: prioritize the business customers as the Raspberry Pi Foundation did (exactly because of such a reason), but let them pay grossly inflated prizes for this privilege, which hardly any private customer would be willing to pay.
If such a course of action had been done, hardly any hobbyist would have complained, in particular or for example if such "exploitative" prizes for business customers would have been used to subsidize Raspberry Pis for schools during the pandemic (which was the original mission of the Raspberry Pi Foundation).
