Obligatory Sold a Story podcast link.
I can’t help but feel that a lot of this is deliberate, the end result of decades of dismantling the public education system to further divide kids into the upper class in private schools, religious fundamentalists in home schooling, and everyone else abandoned to keep the population uneducated and in worse economic precarity.
Somebody please tell me that the kids are alright 
I suppose so. But when I was in college, back in the early 00s, I had friends who were taking Japanese classes just to be part of the fansub community. We could get episodes of FMA and Bleach a day or two in advance because the show was on the UTexas intranet before it got picked up in force by the bigger file-share services.
Crazy to think you could have gotten a legit dub inside of a year.
I suppose by now English subs are just baked into the main release schedule (especially when AI can do a half-assed job of translation on the cheap). And since every major production studio has its eye on the American audience, we get some pretty high profile voice actors in modern releases. Samuel L. Jackson in Afro Samurai, for instance. Or Matthew Mercer doing Attack on Titan’s Levi Ackerman.
Even then, I tend to see a delay on the scale of months on dubs in the English-speaking markets. The official Attack on Titan Final Chapters dub release wasn’t out until a few weeks ago. I watched those episodes subbed back in… I want to say February or March?