Over the past decade+, retailers have been giving up on scrutinizing returns. You used to need a reason for returning something, then it morphed into just "didn't like", then they stopped asking questions, and now it's common for them to not even ask for the item back! This has been widely lauded as customer friendly. And evidently the math worked out that losing a bunch of money on the occasional return wasn't a big deal.
But while this is customer friendly, it completely forgoes the idea of individually judging returns! So now retailers are looking at the absolute amount of money they're losing to returns, and attempting to optimize that. They can't discourage returns outright (by changing their policy) because that would break customer expectations, and it would be extremely hard to inspect/adjudicate returns better because that would require skilled workers, so all they can do is adjust the false positive/false negative ratio.
Another black box approach is the use of surveillance databases like Retail Equation, to track whether an individual has made "too many" returns based on the amount they've spent - a totally irrelevant and unjust metric when you think about it. It also could be "just you" due to getting tripped by these databases, perhaps even because of your first chargeback. Who would know?
The "unfixable" waste also ties into the hollowing out of other business departments too. Many food items are not packed very well and are put in the same box without regards to density, so items arrived dented, crushed, or destroyed. Rather than the return process feed that failure back to the packing department, it's just treated as another "no fault" return. So now as a customer I've just got to accept that many times the items I've ordered are going to arrive damaged, and meanwhile I'm sure I'm building up a record in their surveillance database as a less profitable customer - when it all stems from their mistake.