There is a cost to switching, and a time delay. If you switch faster than the optimal interval, you lose some of the stock that was in-process. Because of this,

There is a cost to switching, and a time delay. If you switch faster than the optimal interval, you lose some of the stock that was in-process. Because of this, a large industry changing their mind back and forth rapidly with a particular alignment to that interval can cause disproportional disruption. This is happening here. They changed their mind on short notice, causing one wave of disruption as everyone adapted, then they changed their mind on short notice again in the opposite direction, causing a second, even bigger wave of disruption on top of that. Suppose you were on a plane from London to Dubai, and someone tells you to get to New York as fast as possible. You can't turn the plane around, so you wait until you're in Dubai and take the next plane in the opposite direction to New York. But halfway there you get a phone call saying you need to be in Singapore instead. Again, you have to wait until you land before you can do anything about it, and your entire current trip is wasted. Getting from where you were originally headed (Dubai) to your ultimate destination (Singapore) is a short trip, but by timing the instructions at especially inconvenient moments, you end up having to add enormous cost and resource waste to reach the same target. The car industry is definitely paying for their fuckup at the moment, but everyone else who uses electronics is stuck on that plane with them going the wrong way.