Oh, whooshed myself

Thanks for the information! I saw like one video about how people make meme coins, so I had some vague understanding, but this makes a lot more sense.

Yes and no; what you're describing is a thing and it's called pre-mining. In the most efficient version of pre-mining you'd mine on your own hardware before releasing the code so that with literally the minimum possible compute power you'd still get 100% of the coins since there is no one else on the network, there is not even a network.

The "coin" in the OP here is really more of a token, and people use the terms interchangeably but there is a difference that matters here; a coin typically has its own blockchain, like bitcoin does, while a token operates inside of another network, like how you can trade the USDC token on the ethereum network. There's no blockchain for the token USDC, but there is a coin for the network the token runs on (ETH for ethereum, SOL for solana).

This token is on the solana network where creating a token means creating a "mint" through the shared token program, and the mint records the total supply anbd who's allowed to create more token. There's a version of step 2 that applies here, it's called bundle sniping. It works in a very similar way but requires no mining and just the transaction cost within the network it runs on (in this case the solana network), in which you (the "developer") buy coins very quickly after the token launches,using other pseudonymous wallets, while the prices are still really low.

In any case, like I said, public ledger. The fact that these strategies are so played out as to have names mean it's also pretty easy to find out if someone did this; for any given token you can see which wallets hold the most of that token and where they got them. There are even automated tools with some of the most ai-gen looking websites i've seen in my life (rugcheck and bubblemaps are 2)

If this all sounds like dumb bullshit; welcome to crypto :-)