It's not a market failure, it's just supply and demand. There are many computer components competing for the same resources (fabs, wafers). Demand for GPUs, RAM etc. has increased a lot due to AI, but supply is still the same due to new fabs being huge investments that take years to build. Of course the price goes up.
> Once you reach this stage, the only escape is to first cover everything with tests and then meticulously fix bugs
The exact same approach is recommended in the book "Working effectively with legacy code" by Michael Feathers, with several techniques on how to do it. He describes legacy code as 'code with no tests'.
You're typing a long command, then before running it you remember you have to do some stuff first. Instead of Ctrl-C to cancel it, you push it to history in a disabled form.
Prepend the line with # to comment it, run the commented line so it gets added to history, do whatever it is you remembered, then up arrow to retrieve the first command.