Unfortunately, the equipment and reagent vendors in the very unregulated life sciences/biomedical research world constitute a racket. Serial buyouts over the last 10 - 15 years have led to a ridiculous degree of consolidation -- the sort that wouldn't fly in a regulated industry, or even one in which regulators are paying any attention at all -- so it's now dominated by two players: Merck (through its MilliporeSigma arm), and Thermo Fisher. The existence of this cartel means that they can essentially get away with murder, both from a fraud angle (which is exactly what the Western blot manipulation is) and by fixing prices to whatever degree they please.

Also unfortunately, biomedical scientists are not known for their tendency to collaborate to face a mutual enemy (the mild pushback against the Elsevier/Springer Nature publishing cartel has come less from scientists and more from university systems whose libraries have to foot most of the bills). From their perspective, it's "What am I gonna do? Raise my own antibodies? Start blowing my own glassware?" So they grimace and bear it.

For reference, here's how their workflow for research antibodies goes (and it's been like this for decades):

1. Produce an antibody the research world needs. Do no QA, that's expensive and unnecessary.

2. Claim with usually no evidence (and apparently by forging evidence) that the antibody works in certain applications.

3. Let researchers buy the antibody and do your QA for you. Even if the antibody doesn't work, only a tiny percentage of buyers will go to the effort of getting a refund.

4. Profit. Keep selling the antibody even when the rare scientist with time on their hands demonstrates beyond doubt that your antibody clearly doesn't work.

5. When sales start drying up because enough people are catching up to the scam, discontinue the antibody. Give no explanation.

6. Repeat from 1.