While Solandri is correct, much of the low prices of RAM were caused by a glut and the subsequent price increase was necessary to keep companies afloat, the changes for NAND are more than a little extreme even given the situation and the SMR HDD problem is blatantly intentional. There is no excuse for putting an SMR hard drive in a consumer product, especially when there are no warnings, not even in the manuals that consumers don't read.
I should mention that with RAM, it's also a little different. RAM is rarely a large part of a computer budget (for consumers at least), so even with it roughly doubling in price, it's not a terrible thing. The same price increase happens with NAND and now there's a problem. NAND companies really should pay more attention and I wouldn't be surprised if the shortage is at least partially intentional. It wouldn't be the first time such a thing happened, not even in recent years.
Besides, in all honesty, global recession hasn't stopped NAND from growing. The whole time problems were worse, NAND kept growing in market share. Besides that, while US trade is important, nothing will stop NAND from moving between national borders because it is too important a product. That people were able to calm down after Trump wins tells me it didn't matter who won. Hillary wasn't going to do anything to get in the way of this and if Trumps victory doesn't stop things from moving back to normal, than I don't know what possibly could.
Finally, a point on 3D-Xpoint: New memory technologies take years after actually launching in products to actually matter these days. How long did it take NAND SSDs to go from that cool toy we read about in benchmarks to actually being in many home computers? We're still working on that. 3D-Xpoint isn't a threat to consumer NAND sales for sure. Enterprise sales, it probably isn't a threat as even if it is superior in performance, its endurance didn't pan out enough to really win and it won't be produced in enough volume to hurt NAND much for the first few years unless Intel and Micron buck the trend of new technologies and sell it barely more expensive than NAND.
Will that happen? I don't know, maybe, but I'd bet not and if I was in with any of the NAND companies, I'd have put my money where my mouth is on this one. If we can see a shortage happening half a year in advance, then something should be done to prevent it. Whether or not it was intentionally caused, there is no debating that it was intentionally not solved in advance. They wanted higher prices, plain and simple. As a business, that makes sense, especially, as you said, when memory is such a competitive market and higher prices help the companies more than they hurt the consumers, but it's still annoying.