Completely different type of applications, I remember an old thread on twitter about one useless wallpapers app being sold for that kind of money. And it was not the only one. It's a business model.
Not sure what "useless wallpaper" app you are talking about but I just took a look at https://bendingspoons.com/products and everything there seems pretty useful and well designed.
That minuscule subset is well designed, yes, the rest decent BUT some of them with in my opinion predatory pricing in many cases, $9/wk to download some wallpaper or some sleep noises app. But yes, they are not the only ones doing it.
If you are interested search on the appstore among the boatload of apps they have.
Tricking users into these high priced subscriptions is a tried and true strategy in the app store. The press caught on late (2018) but it was happening from the moment apple opened up subscriptions to all developers in June 2016. Started with crappy coloring book apps and then spread like wildfire from there. Bending Spoons is simply the evolution of that.
I wouldn't say "fraudolent", no laws are being broken here.
And I'm not trying to be snarky with this, but I'm not doing your research for you on a well known issue of the App Store. I'm ok if you keep being not aware of it.
This specific company has a decade long history of being in the grey zone in regard to App Store rules. Like many others, yes, but let's not normalize it.
if you browse Bending Spoons' site on archive.org you'll see that a few years ago they indeed sold wallpaper apps and keyboard apps for debatable prices.
They had even more apps, but most of them were removed entirely from their portfolio, and some ended up in the account of Easy Tiger Apps, LLC [1], including a 4,99€/week step counting app that is a blatant rip off of a more famous one
Paxys. You probably don't have a clear idea of what kind apps he was referring to. There are no power users in this case.