I'm a retired engineer, and a fair amount of my career was being called in to fix failed projects. Most of the issues are not realizing a problem until it's too late to easily fix - and therefore spending budget and schedule on the wrong items. Then needing more budget and schedule to undo the bad and then to reimplement the fixes.
Anyway, over the last couple of years, I've started watching more youtube, which has suggested some reasonably good/interesting videos from time to time. One channel that I stumbled over was one on shipping logistics....
This guy has a number of interesting and topical videos.
One of these pretty much explains the entire problem and goes back to the early 2000's - He found a report from 2015 that really predicted all of the problems that we have now. The root cause was the offshoring of US industry, the economic downturn in 2008 which removed the need for port investments, which lingered until it exploded as a problem now - which is way too late to really do a lot.
Then you have the California politicians who put new smog rules into effect in that only the absolute newest trucks can pick up the containers at the ports. Lack of trailers to put the containers on, which all serve to backup the containers in the ports - causing lack of space, etc., etc., etc.
It's just not one single problem, it's a whole host of small problems that amplify each other, that is killing the system.
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