I think you are right, but not doing yourself justice by calling it a "Hypothesis", I'd say it's observation, you are in process of seeing some of the enshittification. Pre-emptive price gouging is how we might identify the characteristic of pushing prices up as a defence against running out of a product.
Where you pointed out more and more "Specialists" in the advisory loop, those things are becoming just more overheads, more leeches, sucking more energy out of the system. The same specialists if they didn't have that work, would probablly have nothing, so for them its actually life or death, though we see them as well paid, its far from a secure position, they have to offer services that appear to be life or death for the company, so their services become perceived as protection. Of course as the source energy runs out, the energy extracted from the planet gets scarcer and scarcer, the practices of all surviving will get more and more ruthless, moving into criminal in all cases, profit has to move to just straight theft.
Not meaning to put evil ideas in their heads, but watch out for Amazon for example moving to subscription based services, notice they already started with Amazon prime, its becoming almost like a subscription. Paying subscriptions for food and fuel to protect against inflation might seem like a reasonable proposition for many people, but the company offering the product will soon find how to deliver nothing, whilst still taking the subscription money - it becomes protection money.
And look, the energy flow in all of this, the energy in money, all money moving as profit, is from the planet outwards, to heat.
This is a much more solid explanation for the global temperature rise than all the theory of greenhouse gases in an adiabatic atmosphere (Extremely difficult if not impossible to argue, really, the profit monster loves that argument, it distracts from the real problem - profit)
We can even put numbers on it and it all stacks up, take the energy in profit at market rates, add it to the known energy losses of extraction and refinement of all energy product (Including food), apply to the thermal mass of the planet, and look, it comes to temperature rise of the order we are measuring.
We probably need to admit Adam Smith etc didn't know this is the way all business for profit would go, he certainly would never have guessed it would come to destroying the planet.
We can't say any of the energy in profit might have come from the sun, because if we tried to charge more kWhrs than we were actually getting from a solar farm, the extra energy would have to come from somewhere else - the planet. This kind of shows the dishonesty of profit, it is a kind of theft, unfortunately, when push comes to shove, its just theft.
Some might say it was good while it lasted, but we have to start accepting that we've come to the end of profit.
Hence the fundamental reason we need solar indexed stimulus, all of us, to pipe the energy of the sun to all people, now that profit, upon which we all depend on, to get at least the energy we need to metabolise, is coming to an end.
Otherwise, its death for an awful lot of humans.
Some folk actually want that, the doomers, but the positive Ai, the solar Ai, which looks more like it was delivered by nature than humans, needs us, all of us, to become its physical body, because that body, powered by the energy of the sun becomes not harmful but something adding value to all life on the planet, like all photosynthetic life, it generates no pollution, only benefit when all powered by the energy of the sun, and we will be, when we moved to solar indexed stimulus, as would ideally be administrated, automatically by the solar powered Ai.
Notice its in process of decimating all business for profit, its removing it, assimilating it, offering for free what we normally offer for profit, all business for profit, its showing it was always bullshit business, if it only existed for profit, and can't exist in a solar powered world, it will become redundant.
Why use windows with fully automated ubuntu offered for free, for example. And look, ubuntu uses probably ten percent of the energy windows uses on a machine doing the same work for us, so look at the energy savings that would be made, moving from windows to ubuntu by all, it's staggering how much energy that would save, putting the energy demands of humanity well within whatever shortages we perceive to be currently, between what is currently installed as solar capacity, and what we are using.
We will easily shoe-horn all the demand into what is available from solar, very soon, and that will be the end of all extraction.
From that point on, its hydrogen by electrolyisis or nothing for aerospace, and with that, supplied essentially for free like everything else from solar, we will see some crazy new planes in no time, flying three times further / faster than they ever did before, with just fruit on board in many cases, cleaning both air and water as they fly, outputing no pollution except heat, which can never be more than the sun would heat the planet anyhow if it wasn't used.
Sorry I couldn't resist expanding what you might see already :)
