Yeah, this is pretty standard. Between the low production numbers and the fact that assembly is probably occurring in a country with stronger labor laws than wherever mass-producted hardware is made (mostly China), it’s going to cost more than something you can pick up on Amazon or AliExpress.
There have been a few cases where open-source hardware like this has enough demand to get picked up by a Chinese manufacturer who makes a cheaper version through some combo of unethical labor practices, production scale, employing cheaper or cloned parts and/or dropping features, so it’s not out of the question that a cheaper version comes along, as long as you don’t mind the compromises to get it.
It’s real in the sense that the established policy is to retire ccTLDs within five years of a country code ceasing to exist. But there are multiple provisos there:
.io
ccTLD), for a variety of historical and administrative reasons.cloud
,.gay
,.info
,.tech
)Obviously it’s worth keeping an eye on what IANA does with this situation, but personally I suspect one or the other of the above will happen. It’s probably in the interests of Mauritius to retain the domain as a source of income, but if they don’t then somebody else will likely want to take ownership, and there’s plenty of moneyed interests in retaining
.io
since a number of large business customers (the largest likely being Alphabet/Google) are already using it.