Some of the shortages have been due to supply interruptions, like the hard drive factory getting flooded, or similarly with a DRAM factory catching on fire. I don’t know what happened after the Chia lunacy (Chia was a crypto currency that consumed vast amounts of SSD space and destroyed the SSD’s through extreme write wear) but prices did normalize after a while. I know that Chia was the final straw that got Hetzner to ban crypto mining on its hardware outright. Previously, it was forbidden on VPS’s but allowed on dedicated servers. Anyway it caused a temporary shortage of both SSD and hard drives.