For .com as of Aug 2024, Verisign says they charge $10.26 wholesale, and ICAANN charges $0.18/domain for a total of $10.46/yr wholesale.

Route53's .com is $14/yr. So the three year price is $42.

Three year prices from a few registrars (there's so many pricing games the "per year" price is nonsense in most cases):

    Cloudflare: $31.32 (-0.06)
    GoDaddy: $46.93 (+15.55)
    Namecheap: $41.24 (+9.86)
    Namesilo: $51.87 (+20.49)
    Porkbun: $29.61 (-1.77)
    Route53: $42 (+10.46)
    Spaceship: $28.98 (-2.40)

All diffs given against the $31.38/3yr wholesale price from Verisign+ICAAN.

Not sure how that qualifies as "outrageously expensive".

You can make your own trade-offs, but for something that's literally the foundation of my online identity, business, etc I'm willing to pay $3.50/yr over wholesale for a company with a reputation, support, and generally aligned incentives.

You may choose to instead tie your online identity and business to someone charging less than cost to save half the price of a big mac a year. But I will find it hard to dig up much sympathy when we all find out _how_ they're planning to make money doing that.