Bit of both I think. Briggs has not been doing all that well, a couple mistakes (factory expansion at a bad time, etc) and losing consumer market sales (no longer worth fixing when you can buy a new one for often less than cost of repairs) they gotta make up their money somewhere, they cant raise prices too much on their core commercial market, or they lose business to Kohler, Kawasaki and etc... Ive seen that on any number of popular or fast moving parts each year, seems like they pick a grouping of a few common pieces per engine that you can't easily get anywhere else in the market and jack their prices up for a while.. that or they want to obsolete the parts and raise prices so they don't have to make them any longer as demand falls off.. one thing I learned long ago was to look at raw price files and look for changes to discount code or popularity codes, (like a shift from fast moving code to another code) in the price files and stock a few extras before their next price file updates.. every so often you ended up sitting on a part that you got real cheap that you could sell at "current" dealer cost and still make a fat profit. Though it does take a lot of time (winter months downtime is handy for that sort of analysis) and usually isn't worth the time spent on it, it can be done.
Some manufacturers actually had a code that told you the part was eventually to be obsoleted (TBO) after manufacturer's stockpiles and final production runs finished, parts then started going "NLA" as distributors sold off the last of their stock..
I'll actually be rather surprised if Briggs consumer engines are still in production (other than re-labeled china built engines) in another 10 years... I think they're eventually gonna evolve into Battery power or alternative power engine "modules" that rather than fix, you just swap it out for warranty, or discard/recycle (plastics, Metal, and Li-Ion batteries)
How poor are they who have not patience. What wound did ever heal, but by degrees? - Iago (Othello Act II, Scene 3)