I wasn't thinking on that large of a scale, but it makes me wonder were all those episodes done by the same production company? Though I do seem to recall there were, or are, rental companies in Hollywood that specialize in renting props to productions.
I'm going to have to check the credits more closely and see who the prop master is on a lot of these episodes.
Columbo was produced by Universal. That meant their props and costumes etc. would have come from Universal and it wasn't uncommon to see such things (and even recycled sets) on other Universal shows. It was standard practice back then, especially with Universal which probably more than any other studio had a reputation for grinding out TV shows on a kind of assembly-line basis. Who the prop master is doesn't really matter, it's just all Universal stuff ultimately.
We have a little collection of examples in this article, "Columbo Flashbacks", in the Scrapbook area of the site. Some of them are about recurring locations, or callbacks to prior episodes, but some recurring props are here too:
All the prop cameos just screams that there was one central prop department that supplied the show. Wonder how many were deliberate [mrs. Melville] and how many were coincidental [thermos] and how many were possibly just similar [the colt .32 auto]