I am using eBay since 2004 very often, it's my primary shopping adresse (don't like Amazon) and I noticed this change too.
I guess it's the point, that eBay is nor more a platform for private people as it was in the beginnings.
You won't find a mentionable number of "1€-auctions" or of private sellings anymore.
eBay is more and more a marketplace with E-Shops. Lots of German sellers are big on eBay with shop and professional listings, and they don't have another "real" online-shop / website outside of eBay. So it must kind of easy to create one on eBay, or cheap. Or the number of possible customers is huge.
And well, like everywhere: the Chinese are flooding the market with their cheap trash without the need to mark the origin so you can see it with the first look. But it seems that these chinese powersellers (with huge warehouses in the surroundings of Germany) are paying eBay very well, because they won't do anything against these scammers in case of fake cells or fake electronic articles.
I for my own bought an chinese noname smartphone and a noname tablet this year. Both were at the description super-fast and with an Android up todate. But the first run showed: both were super slow.
The system notifications showed: all specs are good as descriped, but with CPU-Z the real values were shown.
So the chinese "engineeres" hat tricked the Android to show wrong specs.
More treacherous with the tablet. All system notifications including "CPU-Z" and "Assistant for Android" showed the values promised at the eBay description (10 cores, 8g of ram, 128GB flash, actual Android 9).
Only the app "Fake device test" showed the real hardware. Some old 1,3GHz quadcore with 1gb ram and Android 4.4
eBay didn't helped me out allthough I payed with Paypal and both sellers adresses are in Germany. I had to send the devices back (pay the shipping costs for my own) and wait several weeks. For the tablet I waited 3 month, the package was send to china, the seller didn't accept the receivement so the package goes back to me (with ~20 sticker on it, looked very funny). After this I got payed back from eBay. After several month, several mails and messages and lots of lost nerves.
Conclusion for me:
I definetely won't buy any electronic articles on eBay because as customer you have no protection that it is genuine, and your money is lost in most cases.
That's the way how eBay is going to kill itself
And since I wrote a little
article about this fake smartphone and the
fake tablet on my private website some people are mailing me about this and I hope more people won't buy electronics on eBay as well.
sorry for OT but I think in this case you can make a comparison between 18650s and electronic articles in general.