Hi,
The typically advised workaround (it's not a solution despite it being the status quo advisement — ebay is the only ones with the power to solve this issue) is to order search results from highest to lowest to swap the erroneous 0.99 items to the bottom of the pile.
Another thing I've found moderately effective is using the "Search for items from $X to Y" Advanced Search field and setting the minimum to be $1.00
But yes, I do agree this is a blatant abuse of resources, but I've found that while many "Western" sellers get accounts suspended or flagged for these activities that foreign sellers continue these practices unimpeded, often not just having variants, but having the exact same item listed 20-50 times. Often times these foreign sellers will set the listing time to be rather short so they get to make an illusion that they're getting new items when they're just re-listing items that didn't sell within 3 days or something, moving items and whatnot, and have huge swaths of these appearing on result pages every day.
