To be fair, people often have wildly, err, optimistic, prices for their very average cars. They think the sunroof and leather seats on their 8 year old sedan still justifies the premium they had to pay when they bought it from the dealer. It doesn't. With a bit of practice and enough awkward interactions with marginal characters, you can learn to spot ads that are a waste of time.
Only a fraction of ads are priced to market, and those move quickly. The rest linger on classified sites for longer, which can create the impression that nothing is available under $X,000. This is true most of the time, not just now.
The main issue as a second hand buyer is that you need to have good knowledge of what the market will bear. If you're a well-behaved Mustachian, you buy a car once every 5 to 10 years and probably don't follow price trends that closely, if at all. Figuring out today's fair market price (not last year, not 10 years ago) is not easy and requires observing ads in your local market over the course of multiple weeks.