I have personal experience with this.
Your analysis is exactly right, and taking local control away from state and county governments is a partial solution. There should also be financial implications to local governments if they take too long to turn around permit applications. (1.5x actual damages incurred after a cutoff date, paid directly to the home owner, no lawyer required, seems reasonable to me).
In particular, some local planning offices are notoriously obstructionist. In the best case (no zoning exceptions, no objections from neighbors, sympathetic bureaucrats in the office itself), they still needlessly delay the project, and compliance with questionable local regulations with bloat the budget. A San Jose builders association estimates that 25% of the cost of new construction goes to this — I don’t think that includes finance costs due to delay, and it still seems low. Individual homeowners probably pay more as a percentage than well-connected development firms. Alternatively, maybe SJ is more developer-friendly than most places around here.
Over the decades, NIMBYs have passed a set of onerous laws, and created numerous new county offices to enforce them. Of course, the offices are woefully understaffed. There can be a dozen, and they are all backlogged. To resubmit, you have to wait for the slowest office to respond, and with 12 offices, you’ll definitely be resubmitting.
There has been some action at the state level for ADUs (nanny units). Basically, local governments had to remove a bunch of restrictions that were designed to make ADU development impossible, and impose an SLA (of many months, which is lightning fast by CA standards) on permit application processing. If the governments didn’t comply, the law temporarily voided the entirety of their local zoning laws.
Sadly, it only applied to ADU’s, which are limited to being the second house on a lot, with a max square footage of 1200 sq ft.
That’s intentionally too small for families with kids, especially in areas with weird lot shape constraints. I guess this protects affluent schools from poor kids.
Also, they can’t be sold separately from the main house, only rented. Presumably this is to prevent lower class people from owning houses. (If this seems implausible to you, search for “palo alto redlining“ to get an idea of the historical behavior of the city governments around here.)
On the bright side for owners of ADUs, the state-wide rent control laws that were recently passed don’t apply to them (though the anti-eviction clauses might) so home owners can use them to extract extra money from students (and therefore UC), as rent control restricts construction of higher density housing.