> But I would agree that the actual high-level ability to make causal inferences seems to be lacking.

That should be expected. Humans also lack the ability to make causal inference. The vast majority of us have extremely primitive causal reasoning abilities and get even simple causality wrong. Reasoning about causality in complex systems still isn't a solved problem for humans, and we have entire fields within philosophy trying to make sense of the hundreds of paradoxes within causal reasoning. It's not a solved problem, and it's not clear that it ever will be.