There are a limited number of these available in comparison to demand. I think people figured out that LLMs and VLMs can do real work that can replace a lot of humans. And for plenty of jobs, it's good enough to reduce already outsourced staff by 75-90% at a fraction of the cost.

Because lots of people are willing to pay more dollar for smarter token.

Because they are dumping/subsidizing it token processing to try and get companies to fire as many people as possible. So they'll be dependent upon the companies when they have to Jack the rates