The bots ensure that steps are taken such that scares goods are distributed in a manner better than "whoever can pay the most".
RPis have, and will continue to be, aimed at education and enrichment, and the makers/retailers will take steps to ensure that as many people as possible can get ahold of them at a low price.
If you want to start making value judgements about who is worthy to purchase your product, wouldn't it be better to enforce that by directly verifying the identity/worthiness of each individual customer rather than relying on crude proxies like "didn't use a bot to make the purchase"?
In this case it is a vendor deciding not to sell to a customer who is acting in a way they perceive to be bad faith. This is their right as a vendor.
In this case it happens that the bad faith is at comfortably odds with the objectives of the vendor and product manufacturer.
As high incomes diverge even further from low (and even median) incomes, we're doing to see this happen a lot more.
And I think until this chip shortage is over in particular, we will see a lot more measures like this.
I fully applaud this -- I love my Pi 4 and I want more people to experience what these little things can do, without paying over the odds to cynical manipulative stains.
RPis have, and will continue to be, aimed at education and enrichment, and the makers/retailers will take steps to ensure that as many people as possible can get ahold of them at a low price.