The US idiocy was to whiplash de minimis regulations. The US gov't suddenly raised the de minimis threshold to $800; with the easily foreseeable effect that the country got flooded with crap from Temu; and then reacted by eliminating de minimis completely.
If they'd just kept the threshold at $200, all the chaos could have been avoided...
To my mind, the increase from $200 to $800 was more of a pragmatic policy tweak than a change of course. It was a recognition that US customs had limited capacity to check the value of small packages.
The EU also got rid of customs minimums and (at least in germany) has been letting delivery companies charge highway robbery fees to pay the couple of euros and cents for you at the border. The $3 per linie item that is on top of that mess.
