Everyone seems to be forgetting that in July of 2021, when we traded Max & Trea and everyone else, and still had Soto, we were 47-55.
But yeah, that team also featured Kieboom, Fedde, and Robles, none of whom came anywhere close to developing in what they were expected to become. And nobody expected Corbin to repeatedly post 6.000 ERAs
Player development was the problem. They could have kept everyone and stayed competitive with a payroll dwarfing the Dodgers or traded everyone and been terrible (the route they chose). If they had drafted and developed better, they could have tried to keep enough of them to stay competitive while backfilling, but they whiffed so badly across the board that there was no one to backfill with
