It is terrible. I've written on my blog about this. The problem links back not to evil companies, but to the model by which RPGs are sold and how consumers pay for them. Most home campaigns spend far more on snacks than they do for the adventures. Most RPG gamers claim to love RPGs more than anything else, but pay significantly less for the hobby than they do for video games, TV, or movies. Gamers are quick to show outrage when a publisher (regardless of size) tries to price a product at anything higher than current rates, even when every aging publisher seems to need a GoFundMe campaign for their health care.
You explain the result, not the problem. The problem is the hordes of writers willing to write for peanuts. If that pool dried up completely, you would have a shortage of adventures, people would be willing to pay more if they couldn't get it for less. Players/consumers aren't a charity. And if publishers need to GoFundMe, they were in the wrong profession.
But even then it wouldn't solve the problem, there is a huge amount of older adventures that fans keep converting to new editions of RPGs. And while spending $60 on an updated Adventure path would have a good cost/benefit analysis, upping that to $120 would just be painful for many who already spent that on the original AP. Especially when that would happen every few years when new editions show up. How many itterations of Rappan Athuk are there these days? I've lost track...
I suspect that many, many groups play homebrew adventures, upping the prices would just make that percentage larger, selling less adventures, thus negating any advantage a higher price would give for the publishers/writer. At the core of that is that people don't value their own time correctly in the first place. If I calculate the amount of time I spent on writing my own adventures, If I spent that time flipping burgers instead, I could probably buy a luxury car or even a house... The advantage was that I liked doing it (most of the time).
There are other ways of publishing where you'll earn more per word then just writing for someone else, that's business. Still, your better off doing another job then being in the RPG industry, but if your just passively accepting everything people offer you, you'll also not making as much money as you could.