The worse part is that there are a lot of applicants filing multiple applications. They pay some agencies just to file H1B applications for them. This itself is against H1B application policy. There is an ongoing petition trying to get government's attentions:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov//petition/remove-and-ban-ch...
Multiple petitions with multiple legitimate sponsors is not actually disallowed. That being said, there are few situations where a legitimate sponsor would be on-board with an applicant simultaneously filing another petition. I'm not sure if an applicant is legally (as opposed to morally) required to disclose this to sponsors. It is certainly abused all the time.
It's a tragedy of the commons. In order to have a chance against 233k other petitions, if people can get multiple petitions filed on their behalf, they would be stupid not to. Which then inflates the overall number even further.
The people it really hurts are highly qualified individuals sponsored by a single well known tech company ... like I was two years ago. Luckily I got my H1-B then and am now well on the way to a green card.
Filing multiple applications is legitimate as long as it is all the sponsors who pay the application fees. But a lot of these sponsors (ICC) do not actually pay these fees, instead they get paid by the applicants to apply H1B for them.