You'd have to go back to around 2000 to find rates on a 30 year fixed comparable to today's. https://www.freddiemac.com/pmms
Historically we're still in a period of pretty good rates. However, the reality is who cares about what things were like more than 25 years ago. The new normal is 6ish percent, and we're over that right now. I don't think we're ever going to see rates below 5% again, not counting for some extraneous circumstance nobody can predict. But at this point any relief is going to be meaningful to a lot of people.
On the other hand, home prices are not coming down, and they probably will not come down even if there's plenty of overinflated valuations out there.
Therefore the only thing to give on affordability is increased supply to keep home values from continuing to grow in a pace that outruns incomes, and lower rates so more people can afford what's out there today.
I don't think we disagree here.
Rates are higher than the current market can bear, a result of the artificially extended period of historically low rates. The pandemic can only be blamed for some of this. The prior administration juicing the economy against sound economical principals telling us rates should have continued the rise that started around 2016/2017 contributed at least as much and hamstrung our tools to respond.
Housing stock shortages have long list of causes, as you line out. With so many things contributing to the problem it's hard to cope with, both at a policy level and for us regular folk. An average person needs an explanation that's easy and memorable, and thereby actionable in terms of throwing their support behind. That's not easy when there's not enough fingers to point, solutions to each aren't clear, and there's only so much political bandwidth that can be put towards making change.
It's going to be slow, and not everything will work, but I'm glad there is finally attention on it and it looks like the people who can do things are doing them instead of just talking.