See also ‘domain tasting’ (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting), where registrars would temporarily register non-existent domains when someone attempted to load them, showing a ‘for sale’ page to skim extra money off registrations.
Incidentally, I was paranoid about this kind of front-running for years before I knew it had actually happened, and would just use whois from the terminal when searching for domain availability.
That was the last time i registered anything with GoDaddy
Later the 5-day grace period was added by ICANN to deal with accidental registrations, a full refund would be given if the domain was released in that time. Supposedly to protect end users against mistakes like typos and other errors, though I'm not sure why that would need five full days. This made “domain tasting” an open season and a great many registrars would do it, even registering a few times to extend the five days. Some actually did it as an advantage for the end user: they were not going to get snipped by waiting a few days and the registrar didn't jack up the price. But many were a bit more nefarious.
They later added a small processing fee to the refunds in the grace period after the first few domains per account per period (or similar) which vastly reduced this happening, so it is now pretty much a historic problem.