Probably my takeaway would be extreme pessimism looking at this report. If you look around page 175, you will see they were scheduling 60+ citizenship ceremonies per day in early 2020. A year later in September 2021, it's around 20 per day maximum, with many days in single digits (page 180). For January 2022, it's 2-3 per day.
There's an interesting tidbit on page 190 that in April 2021, they did a blitz to try and move as many people to the testing stage, especially if the application was 13+ months old, including allowing people to write the test while clearances are still pending, and that they should be following: test invite, test written within 21 days, 30 days to move to decision made, and 7 days to invite to ceremony.
Page 194 mentions that there is an inventory of over 360,000 applications and a processing time of 19+ months.
Page 217 shows the increase in processing time caused by the pandemic on a per case basis;
Pre-testing preparation has gone from 1.5 hrs to 3
Testing has gone from 1.5hrs to 6 and requires 3 staff instead of 1
There's a note in one of the annex that "time to process a citizenship file for knowledge testing and ceremonies has increased by ~300%
There's lots more but it all just basically says the same thing; there's a ton of applications, they are taking longer to process. They were never really set up to work this way and haven't done a great job building an infrastructure to handle remote working, and like everywhere else in the world, people are getting burned out by pandemic fatigue.
