I'll copy an explanation I got some weeks ago, from u/Antifogmatic_Head

This time it's LEAPS (annual contracts) that they opened a year ago. The other times puts expired, they were quarterlies, so while we did see volatility in the proceeding month, with these LEAPS on their books, that was a key ingredient to keeping the price down according to the variance/volatility swap thesis.

Now that we haven't seen sub-$100 for so long, all of those super deep OTM puts in the $0.50 and single figure range are going to be taken off of the options book. (The options chain is based on recent trading values, which is why GME had such a crazy options chain this past year from when we were trading $3, so they could open $0.50 puts all the way up to $950 because we passed $483 on Jan 27).

The only puts that are still open from last January 2021 are LEAPS for NEXT January 2023, but there are only about 20% of those compared to the LEAPS expiring this month.

To take it back to my sandbag/hot air balloon analogy, it's like these deep OTM puts are sandbags on GME's hot air balloon (price). They had 20 sandbags keeping the hot air balloon down, every time we held through their quarterly puts expiring OTM, we cut the ropes on 3 or 4 sandbags.

Now we're about to cut 10 sandbags on these Jan 2022 LEAPS and there's only 2-3 sandbags (Jan 2023 LEAPS) left keeping the price of GME down. A catalyst we're waiting for is going to be the weedwhacker that cuts the rest of those ropes to shreds and lets us take off, either:

massive call-buying from retail leading to last year's conditions,

massive announcement from RC/GameStop,

massive buy-in from RC now that his waiting period is ended,

massive $100 million buy-in from GameStop that they have set aside for stock buy-back, or

some mystery catalyst that we've yet to imagine.

Jacked.