We’ve noticed this too, how everything just seems to have gotten roundly worse and wildly unreliable since the pandemic. Despite what the NYT commentator clowns write, there are still supply chain issues as well.
Covidians want to blame Covid but the issues are far more fundamental than that. To be fair, Covid and the pandemic response contributed to the decline but is not really explanatory. Post-pandemic, for a variety of reasons that even I don’t understand, society feels run down, possessed by an anomie that seems more like an overhang from the Great Recession of more than a decade prior rather than any direct effects of Covid itself.
It’s like we’re only pretending to have a civilization, and the mask is slowly slipping.