The answer to generic defect is not to have a bunch of incompatible stuff with no commonality.
The NIMBY effect can kill literally anything, the issue with nuclear is cost, far more then NIMBY.
NuScale was always a bad idea. The PWR is the problem, making it smaller doesn't really solve the issues with them.
Project in Canada are struggling because the market in Canada is just to small. The reality is, you need massive amounts of funding, but with the way regulations work, even if Canada were literally perfect in every way, as long as large markets like the US, has unusable regulation, and Europe has wildly all over the place regulation, the needed money is just almost impossible to happen.
You are right that there is nothing new here, except maybe that large private institutions are starting to do some investing.
But the reality is, Rickover was right, Alvin M. Weinberg was even more right. An France did maybe the smart decision in their history when they embraced that philosophy. Sadly they only did so for 1-2 decades and then the next generation came in, was convinced that all those old people were idiots and now that the problem was solved for them they no longer had to pay attention to energy policy.