And a very important section, that does not surprise me at all:

The low success rate of applications has been put down, in part, to an increasingly number of speculative applications being submitted. Industry reports show a rise in so called “phantom projects” in these cases, developers submit multiple applications for many sites, with the expectation being that very few will connect. These speculative and duplicate applications have seen the connections queue grow, increasing the work needed to progress projects.

It becomes a sad self-fulfilling prophecy. Applications take a long time to process, so companies fling lots in parallel, then only use the first to get through.
Which means that applications take even longer to get through.